Safer science: making psychological science more replicable

Abstract

A fundamental part of the scientific enterprise is for each field to engage in critical self-examination to detect errors in our theories and methods, and improve them. Psychology has recently been undergoing such a self-examination. Psychological scientists arguably tackle one of the hardest phenomena to understand and predict: human behavior. Naturally, our data are noisy and our findings are often tentative. However, we are slowly building knowledge and making our theories more complete. The recent self-analysis has revealed several ways we can further improve our research practices to make our findings more sound, including: collecting larger datasets (more participants, more kinds of measures, more observations), being more transparent about our research process and results, and conducting more replications. These new norms are gaining steam within psychology and beyond, making science stronger.