Psychology’s False Discovery Rate ~18%

Analyzing 487,996 statistical tests from 35,515 papers (1975–2017), the study finds substantial publication bias and p‑hacking and persistently low power, yet estimates only about 17.7% of reported significant results are false under stated assumptions. Power improved only slightly over four decades and meets 80% only for large effects. — This tempers replication‑crisis nihilism while underscoring the need for power, preregistration, and bias controls, shaping how media, funders, and policymakers treat psychology evidence.

Sources

Are most published research findings false? Trends in statistical power, publication selection bias, and the false discovery rate in psychology (1975–2017) - PMC

2025.10.07 100% relevant

Estimate: 'The share of false discoveries among all significant results was 17.7%' from a corpus of 35,515 psychology papers (1975–2017).

PSYCHOLOGY. Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science - PubMed

2015.10.07 78% relevant

The Open Science Collaboration’s 2015 mass replication (e.g., ~36% significant replications, effect sizes roughly halved) paved the way for later meta‑audits that estimate psychology’s false‑positive share (~17.7%). The OSC paper is the empirical foundation that triggered these field‑level quantifications.