For the past several years, social scientists have been deeply worried about the replicability of their findings. Incredibly influential, textbook findings in psychology — like the “ego depletion” theory of willpower, or the “marshmallow test” — have been bending or breaking under rigorous retests. And the scientists have learned that what they used to consider commonplace methodological practices were really just recipes to generate false positives. This period has been called the “replication crisis” by some. While this is certainly a red flag for science, there’s also a silver lining to the issue of replicability: by learning from failed replications, scientists learn to do better science.
Why it’s OK that scientists are failing to replicate social science studies
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