Psychology’s Bold Initiative

Siri Carpenter in Science:

Some psychology researchers argue that a scientific culture that too heavily favors new and counterintuitive ideas over the confirmation of existing results has led to too many findings that are striking for their novelty and published in respected journals—but are nonetheless false. A new online site (PsychFileDrawer.org) lets psychologists post results of replications of experiments—whether they succeed or fail—that would ordinarily never leave their file drawer because most journals decline to publish straightforward replication studies. And a group of more than 50 academic psychologists, which calls itself the Open Science Collaboration, has begun an unprecedented, large-scale project to systematically replicate psychological experiments recently published in leading journals.