Late last month, Science magazine published a story about something called the Reproducibility Project. The project began in 2011 when a University of Virginia psychologist and his team recruited more than 250 researchers, identified 100 psychological studies published in 2008, and rigorously redid those experiments in close collaboration with the original authors.
As New York Times science reporter Benedict Carey wrote, the Reproducibility Project completely validated the significance of 35 of the 100 studies.
None of the conclusions of the other studies were directly contradicted, though their results were found to be weaker than in the original studies.
Yet in the opening line of his Aug. 28 New York Times story, Carey wrote, “The field of psychology sustained a damaging blow.”
We’ve brought two Wagner College psychology professors and researchers to the studio to shed some light on this: Dr. Laurence Nolan and Dr. Amy Eshleman.
Research, faculty/student collaboration at Wagner
Wagner College psychology professors Dr. Laurence Nolan and Dr. Amy Eshleman talk about the kind of research they conduct, and about the opportunities for research collaboration that exist for Wagner undergraduate students.
Context:
The Reproducibility Project singled out just 100 psychology experiments to examine.
At Wagner College alone, about 100 research collaborations between psychology faculty members and students are conducted each year.
The Psych Info database maintains a catalogue of nearly 4 million articles on psychology studies.