If you were to ask two psychologists, a pessimist and an optimist, as to when psychology entered what we now know as the “replication crisis,” the former might state “decades ago” whereas the latter might be inclined to say “2011.” Despite this disagreement, both are likely to agree that two key occurrences in 2011 that received considerable attention, namely the scientific fraud case of Diederik Stapel (e.g., Levelt, Drenth, & Noort, 2012; Vogel, 2011) and Daryl Bem’s study on extrasensory perception (Bem, 2011), marked the beginning of a broader awareness that something was not quite right in the realm of psychology. In particular, following failed replications and criticisms of Bem’s findings (e.g., Ritchie, Wiseman, & French, 2012; Wagenmakers, Wetzels, Borsboom, & van der Maas, 2011), pervasive problems in psychology regarding the way we report, analyze, and selectively publish data surfaced with a previously unseen intensity. Consequently, many classical findings and an increasing number of recent studies published in high-ranking journals have come under scrutiny in various replication studies: Camerer et al. (2018), for instance, found that only 13 out of 21 social and behavioral science studies published between 2010 and 2015 in Nature and Science could successfully be replicated. With estimated replication rates ranging between 25% for social psychology and 50% for cognitive psychology (Open Science Collaboration, 2015), it became obvious that psychology suffers from a severe replicability problem. The full article can be found at: https://econtent.hogrefe.com/doi/full/10.1027/2151-2604/a000389
Renkewitz, F., & Heene, M. (2019) The Replication Crisis and Open Science in Psychology: Methodological Challenges and Developments, Zeitschrift für Psychologie (2019), 227, pp. 233-236.
