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Friday, July 11, 2014

Replication Crisis in Psychology Research Turns Ugly and Odd

By Tom Bartlett
The Chronicle of Higher Education
Originally published June 23, 2014

Another salvo was fired recently in what's become known...as "repligate."

In a blog post published last week, Timothy D. Wilson, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and the author of Redirect: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change, declared that "the field has become preoccupied with prevention and error detection--negative psychology--at the expense of exploration and discovery."

The evidence that psychology is beset with false positives is weak, according to Mr. Wilson, and he pointed instead to the danger of inept replications that serve only to damage "the reputation of the original researcher and the progression of science."

While he called for finding common ground, Mr. Wilson pretty firmly sided with those who fear that psychology's growing replication movement, which aims to challenge what some critics see as a tsunami of suspicious science, is more destructive than corrective.

Still, Mr. Wilson was polite. Daniel Gilbert, less so.

The entire article is here.