Image: Reproducible bullseyes, by andresmp via publicdomainfiles.com. Public domain.
You read a lot about reproducibility these days. In psychology, it’s a full-blown crisis – or so people say. They may even be right, I suppose: while it’s tempting to dismiss this as melodrama, in fact a surprising number of well-known results in psychology do actually seem to be irreproducible. In turn, this has given rise to fervent calls for us to do “reproducible science”, which has two main elements. First, we’re asked to publish detailed and meticulous accounts of methodologies and analytical procedures, so that someone else can replicate our experiments (or analyses). Second, we’re asked to actually undertake such replications. Only this way, we’re told, can we be sure that our results are reproducible and therefore robust*.
Being reproducible, though, makes a result robust in only one of two possible senses of the word, and I think it’s the less interesting of the two. What do I mean by that? Continue reading →
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