Credibility of psychological theories or studies in question

More rigorous approach is needed if scientists and scientific journals want the public to have confidence in the reliability of published studies because a new study has questioned the credibility of psychological studies and research.

 

This answer doesn’t mean that the unconfirmed studies are not right, rather it is a strong reminder that every study rarely comes up with perfect answers. This also explains the reason behind why scientists often address new findings by saying that more research is needed.

About 100 psychology and social science studies were tried to duplicate by a team of 270 scientists that had been published in three top peer-reviewed US journals in 2008.

The findings in the journal Science said that just 39 percent came out with same results as the initial reports.

Study co-author Brian Nosek from the University of Virginia said the research shows the need for scientists to continually question themselves.

Nosek said scientists are also under pressure to publish their research regularly and in top journals, and the process can lead to a skewed picture.

“It’s important to note that this somewhat disappointing outcome does not speak directly to the validity or the falsity of the theories,” said Gilbert Chin, a psychologist and senior editor at the journal Science.

The study topics ranged from people’s social lives and interactions with others to research involving perception, attention and memory.

No medical therapies were called into question as a result of the study, although a separate effort is underway to evaluate cancer biology studies.

Problems can arise when scientists cherry-pick their data to include only what is deemed “significant,” or when study sizes are so small that false negatives or false positives arise.

“Not everything we do gets published. Novel, positive and tidy results are more likely to survive peer review and this can lead to publication biases that leave out negative results and studies that do not fit the story that we have,” he said.

John Ioannidis, a biologist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, told Science magazine that he suspects about 25 percent of psychology papers would hold up under scrutiny, about the same “as what we see in many biomedical disciplines,” he was quoted as saying.

There are ways to fix the process so that findings are more likely to hold up under scrutiny, according to Dorothy Bishop, professor of developmental neuropsychology at the University of Oxford.

Some of the most worrying scientific failures are the errors and falsifications that occur at crime laboratories, where wrong results can deprive someone of their freedom, or even their life.

She urged mandatory registration of research methods beforehand to prevent scientists from picking only the most favorable data for analysis, as well as requiring adequate sample sizes and wider reporting of studies that show null result, or in other words, those do not support the hypothesis initially put forward.

Scientists could also publish their methods and data in detail so that others could try to replicate their experiments more easily.

 

 

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