What is Replication crisis?
The replication crisis is the ongoing discovery that many published research findings in psychology, medicine, and other sciences cannot be reproduced when studies are conducted again by independent researchers. It has fundamentally reshaped research practices and standards.
How it works
The Open Science Collaboration (2015) found that only 36% of 100 psychology studies successfully replicated. Contributing factors include p-hacking, HARKing, publication bias, small sample sizes, and inflated effect sizes. The crisis is not that science is broken but that certain research practices (underpowered studies, flexible analysis, publication bias toward positive results) systematically produced a literature with a high false-positive rate. Reforms include pre-registration, open data, larger samples, and registered reports.
Applied example
Ego depletion, the widely-cited finding that self-control is a limited resource that gets depleted, failed to replicate in a large pre-registered multi-lab study. This called into question thousands of subsequent studies that were built on the assumption that ego depletion was a robust phenomenon.
Why it matters
The replication crisis has led to a scientific reform movement that is producing more reliable research through transparency, pre-registration, and replication, ultimately strengthening rather than weakening behavioral science.
