Replication Crisis as Procedure Failure

Updated: 2026.03.31 18D ago 5 sources
Reframe psychology’s replication crisis not as a need for new grand theories but as a crisis of research procedures, incentives, and institutional norms (publication bias, low power, p‑hacking, weak peer review). Fixes should prioritize mandatory provenance, routine robustness maps, preregistration, data/analysis audit trails, and changes to hiring/promotion incentives rather than speculative theoretical revolutions. — This reframing shifts oversight and funding toward concrete governance reforms (journals, funders, universities) and away from abstract theory battles, altering how policymakers, educators and funders allocate attention and resources.

Sources

A Very Unscientific History of Scientific Hoaxes
Jake Currie 2026.03.31 68% relevant
Piltdown and the modern cases illustrate how procedural and methodological weaknesses — and not just bad actors — let false claims persist until new methods or scrutiny expose them, linking to broader replication and verification problems.
How ‘Tiny Shortcuts’ Are Poisoning Science
Eric Neumayer 2026.03.24 90% relevant
The article documents and diagnoses the same mechanism captured by this idea: small, routine researcher choices ('tweaking', p‑hacking, specification searching) systematically inflate published effects and produce non‑replicable results; it names the practice, cites replication evidence (effect sizes shrink, replications often fail), and argues these procedural failures drive a credibility crisis.
One Weird Trick to Get Significant Results
Cremieux 2026.03.13 90% relevant
The article documents a procedural mechanism (subgroup mining / interaction fishing) that produces fragile, non‑replicable results and quantifies why (interactions need far more power), directly illustrating how routine research practices produce the replication crisis.
Psychology’s Greatest Hits (Part 3/3)
Josh Zlatkus 2026.03.11 82% relevant
By stressing that domain‑specific, falsifiable claims and tighter measurement (neuroscience, perceptual science, learning laws) survive scrutiny, the authors diagnose replication failures as methodological/procedural rather than purely cultural, aligning with the idea that replication problems reflect procedural weaknesses.
Psychology’s Greatest Misses (Part 1/3)
Josh Zlatkus 2026.01.07 100% relevant
The article explicitly contrasts Kuhnian‑style revolution with a 2008‑style model failure and urges procedural remedies; it cites education (3‑cueing/phonics) and clinical psychology as domains harmed by flawed methods.
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