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And that isn’t necessarily a bad thing, if it inspires self-correction.
Half of social science studies don’t replicate. That has become one of the most widely cited facts about modern research. It has also become one of the most misunderstood.
“You can’t trust studies,” people say, “because they don’t replicate.” But how do we know they don’t replicate? Because of studies.
A new report in Nature discusses the results of a seven-year project called Systematizing Confidence in Open Research and Evidence, or Score, which aimed to evaluate the replicability of 3,900 social science papers. Researchers who reran these studies could only reproduce about half of the results. This echoes previous endeavors over the past decade, which found that in fields such as psychology and cancer biology, less than half of replication attempts matched the original results.
Continue reading the entire piece here at the Wall Street Journal
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Rob Henderson is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal.