Michael Inzlicht, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto, is a co-author on the forthcoming ego depletion paper. While he's not ready to discuss it in depth ("I do not think it's wise to talk about this until people can actually read the paper for themselves," he tells me in an email), he did clarify that the result won't spell the absolute death of ego depletion theory. "There would need to be a few more of these massive replication failures to support a claim like that," he says.
But beyond the demise of the theory, for Inzlicht the results represent something greater, and sadder. He's worked on ego depletion for most of a decade. His studies have been published in top journals. "I’m in a dark place," he writes in a recent blog post. "Have I been chasing puffs of smoke for all these years?"
Depending on whom you ask, this moment is either a crisis for the science or a revolution to hold researchers and journals more accountable for flimsy conclusions.
For psychologists, the problem is not going to go away anytime soon. Nor are the solutions easy. But there's a chance that this fire will be cleansing — and that the science of psychology will emerge from this period stronger, more effective, and more trustworthy.
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Social priming theory isn't necessarily wrong. But when researchers failed to replicate the slow-walking result with more than double the number of participants, it cast doubt on both the conclusions and psychology's ability to reliably test for them. Especially concerning was that in the replication test, experimenters only found the result — participants walking more slowly — when they were told this was the probable outcome.
The crisis intensified this past August when a group of psychologists called the Open Science Collaboration published a report in the Science with evidence of an overarching problem: When 270 psychologists tried to replicate 100 experiments published in top journals, only around 40 percent of the studies held up. The remainder either failed or yielded inconclusive data. What's more, the replications that did work showed weaker effects than the original papers.
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With the Open Science Collaboration project and other large-scale replication projects like it, psychologists aren't setting off to prove or disprove individual conclusions. Rather, they're asking the question: What is the difference between the experiments that can be replicated and the ones that cannot?
The answer to that question is the key to solving the discipline's core problem. If psychology finds it has to start from scratch evaluating its hypotheses, at least it will be able to do so in a manner that's more methodologically sound.
"We never want to be at a point where every single study, every one, has to have five direct replications run," says Sanjay Srivastava, a psychologist at the University of Oregon who blogs about issues in the field on his website the Hardest Science. "We want to know, ultimately, what are the signs of a healthy science?"
[---]
These are troubling times for psychology, but there's also reason for optimism. During this time of reappraisal, some textbooks may need to be rewritten, and some egos will be badly bruised. But psychology will have a more solid foundation.
"To be clear: I am in love with social psychology," Inzlicht writes. And you have to be honest with those you love.
- What psychology’s crisis means for the future of science
But beyond the demise of the theory, for Inzlicht the results represent something greater, and sadder. He's worked on ego depletion for most of a decade. His studies have been published in top journals. "I’m in a dark place," he writes in a recent blog post. "Have I been chasing puffs of smoke for all these years?"
Depending on whom you ask, this moment is either a crisis for the science or a revolution to hold researchers and journals more accountable for flimsy conclusions.
For psychologists, the problem is not going to go away anytime soon. Nor are the solutions easy. But there's a chance that this fire will be cleansing — and that the science of psychology will emerge from this period stronger, more effective, and more trustworthy.
[---]
Social priming theory isn't necessarily wrong. But when researchers failed to replicate the slow-walking result with more than double the number of participants, it cast doubt on both the conclusions and psychology's ability to reliably test for them. Especially concerning was that in the replication test, experimenters only found the result — participants walking more slowly — when they were told this was the probable outcome.
The crisis intensified this past August when a group of psychologists called the Open Science Collaboration published a report in the Science with evidence of an overarching problem: When 270 psychologists tried to replicate 100 experiments published in top journals, only around 40 percent of the studies held up. The remainder either failed or yielded inconclusive data. What's more, the replications that did work showed weaker effects than the original papers.
[---]
With the Open Science Collaboration project and other large-scale replication projects like it, psychologists aren't setting off to prove or disprove individual conclusions. Rather, they're asking the question: What is the difference between the experiments that can be replicated and the ones that cannot?
The answer to that question is the key to solving the discipline's core problem. If psychology finds it has to start from scratch evaluating its hypotheses, at least it will be able to do so in a manner that's more methodologically sound.
"We never want to be at a point where every single study, every one, has to have five direct replications run," says Sanjay Srivastava, a psychologist at the University of Oregon who blogs about issues in the field on his website the Hardest Science. "We want to know, ultimately, what are the signs of a healthy science?"
[---]
These are troubling times for psychology, but there's also reason for optimism. During this time of reappraisal, some textbooks may need to be rewritten, and some egos will be badly bruised. But psychology will have a more solid foundation.
"To be clear: I am in love with social psychology," Inzlicht writes. And you have to be honest with those you love.
- What psychology’s crisis means for the future of science
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