Short Communication - (2021) Volume 7, Issue 8
Is it possible to keep faith in psychology despite the "replication crisis"? Perhaps, but the field faces a much bigger challenge.
In psychology, there has been a lot of talk about a "replication issue" or "credibility crisis" in recent years. Various scientific discoveries don't seem to be repeatable when other scientists conduct identical experiments.
The majority of the attention in this situation is on scientists' actions: were the original experiments skewed? Was the job done in a shoddy manner? Was someone tampering with the system, if not outright cheating? However, a more insidious issue may be inherent in how individuals think [1].
Many people who study, practice, and report on psychology believe that thoughts, feelings, behaviours, and other psychological results are the product of one or two powerful elements or causes. This is referred to as a "mechanistic worldview."
Typical experiments aim to identify one or two variables, modify them, and observe moderate to strong, repeatable effects.
A mechanical worldview suggests that if we make individuals furious by showing them a film clip that goes against their strongly held values, they should scowl, their blood pressure should increase, and they should be more prone to respond aggressively.
According to a mechanistic worldview, you should be able to replicate the results of this basic experiment in any scientific lab.
It shouldn't matter what time of day the experiment is conducted, what nation it is conducted in, the researchers' sex or gender, the culture of the subjects, what they ate for breakfast or how much sleep they got, whether any of them are taking medicine, and so on.
Such influences are dismissed as noise, and their impact is overlooked. If the experiment does not yield the same results time and over, the natural conclusion is that the initial study was defective and the conclusion is incorrect.
However, a more reasonable assumption is that psychological outcomes are not caused by a few simple, powerful elements in the first place. They develop from a complex web of weak, interconnected variables.
This is referred to as having a complexity mindset. The brain and the body are both dynamic and complicated systems. Any one of the system's variables will have a minor impact. More significantly, we can't change one variable and expect the rest to stay the same [2].
When we consider the brain and body as simple mechanical systems, focusing on one or two variables while leaving the rest unmeasured, the impact of a larger web of weak elements is misinterpreted as a failure to reproduce.
The absence of replication could actually indicate the presence of significant variation. Only by designing studies to measure and monitor that variation can scientists learn about its structure and simulate it.
As a result, in order to perceive and account for complexity, psychology's most cherished experimental approach — the lab experiment – may need a massive makeover.
Even when scientists carefully construct studies with complexity in mind, the results are frequently described in mechanistic terms when reported in the popular press. When a news storey on science has a snappy headline like "Brain circuit X generates fear" or "Gene Y causes depression," it's easier to understand and comprehend.
Is psychology experiencing a credibility crisis? Perhaps, but not the one that has people's tongues wagging.
Not because its conclusions are inaccurate, but because variance is being ignored as noise rather than being examined as something valuable, psychological science may need to get its act together.
Complexity, not simple, mechanistic cause-and-effect, is what gives rise to psychological phenomena [3].
Citation: Sullivan, Pragna. What Study States about Replication Crisis or Credibility of Findings in Psychological Science? Clin Exp Psychol 2021, 7(8), 267.
Received: 28-Jul-2021 Published: 18-Aug-2021, DOI: 10.35248/2471-2701.21.7.267
Copyright: © 2021 Sullivan P. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
