It is unusual to spend time with almost any news source without being warned about yet another crisis. One of the more recent ones in psychology and related disciplines, for example, is called the “replication crisis.” This issue involves the important process of duplicating research to test its findings. Some even say that replication is the “backbone” of the scientific method because describing what we did and how we did it, step-by-step, allows others to repeat the process. This basic feature of science makes it possible to either verify or question findings or claims and build up a body of knowledge over time.

Still, science, including social science, is a human creation, which means it has flaws. They include such things as a tendency to focus too much on dramatic findings, jumping to conclusions, and failing to offer independent confirmation. Indeed, the Open Science Collaboration (Nosek, 2015) examined 100 articles in three top-tier psychology journals only to find that merely a third of them were replicable – and that is among the best of the best! This situation should concern anyone interested in scientific claims about human behavior.

Fortunately, there are two ways to replicate work. One is called “conceptual replication” and involves independent work that corroborates a concept or idea. The other is to do “exact replication,” which involves........

© Psychology Today