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Psychology’s Replication Crisis Is Running Out of Excuses
Over the past few years, an international team of almost 200 psychologists has been trying to repeat a set of previously published experiments from its field, to see if it can get the same results. Despite its best efforts, the project, called Many Labs 2, has only succeeded in 14 out of 28 cases. Six years ago, that might have been shocking. Now it comes as expected (if still somewhat disturbing) news. In recent years, it has become painfully clear that psychology is facing a “reproducibility crisis,” in which even famous, long-established phenomena—the stuff of textbooks and TED Talks—might not be real. There’s social priming, where subliminal exposures can influence our behavior.
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How to Trick Yourself into Improving Your Performance
You’ve probably heard by now that trying to multitask is a terrible idea. One main reason is that our neural wiring does not allow us to split our attention: when we try to attend to two things at once, all we actually do is switch our focus back and forth between them. Darting our attentional spotlight around in this way decreases our performance, as multiple studies have shown. The consequences can be deadly: texting while driving is more dangerous than drunk driving.
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New Research From Clinical Psychological Science
A sample of research articles exploring psychopathy and interpersonal distance, negative urgency and emotion regulation, and maternal psychosocial risk profiles in pregnancy.
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Work Meetings Are Terrible. Here’s How to Make Them Better.
When trying to understand why meetings suck so hard, it can help to use the analogy of our rapidly depleting fisheries. Fisherman don’t really have any incentive to stop fishing, and countries can’t quite agree on who should be responsible for which fish fall under their jurisdiction. And so, no one does very much to ameliorate the situation, in all likelihood robbing future generations of the chance to munch on the spicy tuna rolls and grilled swordfish that we enjoyed in such great abundance. The culture surrounding workplace meetings suffers from a similar problem.
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Replications of Psychological Findings Don’t Appear to Hinge on Study-Population Differences, Global Multilab Project Shows
Failures to reproduce psychological research findings are often attributed to differences in the study population being examined. But results from a massive international scientific project upend that claim.
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Could this be the cure for fake news?
For decades, medicine has provided us with an easy way to prevent diseases: vaccines. Most of us are familiar with how a vaccine works – it exposes our bodies to weakened versions of a virus to help us build antibodies against the real thing. Now common practice in GPs around the world, vaccination has all but extinguished some of the worst diseases of the last century, including measles and polio. But could vaccines have applications beyond medicine? Researchers like Sander van der Linden are working on a type of vaccination that could combat a very 21st-Century scourge: fake news. This could work because misinformation behaves like a virus.
