Replicability Crisis in Social Psychology: Looking at the Past to Find New Pathways for the Future

Abstract

Over the last few years, psychology researchers have become increasingly preoccupied with the question of whether findings from psychological studies are generally replicable. The debates have originated from some unfortunate events of scientific misconduct in the field, and they have reached a climax with the recent discovery of a relatively weak rate of replicability of published literature, leading to the so-called replicability crisis in psychology. The present paper is concerned with examining the issue of replicability in the field of social psychology. We begin by drawing a state of the art of the crisis in this field. We then highlight some possible causes for the crisis, discussing topics of statistical power, questionable research practices, publication standards, and hidden auxiliary assumptions of context-dependency of social psychological theories. Finally, we argue that given the absence of absolute falsification in science, social psychology could greatly benefit from adopting McGuire’s perspectivist approach to knowledge construction.

Keywords

• Perspectivism
• Publication standards
• Questionable research practices
• Replicability crisis
• Social psychology
• Statistical power