100 psychology experiments repeated, less than half successful

Since November 2011, the Center for Open Science has been involved in an ambitious project: to repeat 100 psychology experiments and see whether the results are the same the second time round. The first wave of results will be released in tomorrow’s edition of Science, reporting that fewer than half of the original experiments were successfully replicated.

The studies in question were from social and cognitive psychology, meaning that they don’t have immediate significance for therapeutic or medical treatments. However, the project and its results have huge implications in general for science, scientists, and the public. The key takeaway is that a single study on its own is never going to be the last word, said study coordinator and psychology professor Brian Nosek.

“The reality of science is we're going to get lots of different competing pieces of information as we study difficult problems,” he said in a public statement. “We're studying them because we don't understand them, and so we need to put in a lot of energy in order to figure out what's going on. It's murky for a long time before answers emerge.”