He wants some readings on the replication crisis that are accessible to college freshmen in economics

Harvey Rosen writes:

My query is similar to the one from André Ariew that you posted on August 7, in which he asked if you could suggest readings for his graduate course in philosophy. I occasionally teach an undergraduate course on introductory microeconomics. I like to devote some time to discussing challenges to economists’ conventional model of rational decision-making. As you know, some of the most salient challenges come from psychologists, who argue that people’s decisions are driven by unconscious biases rather than sensible tradeoffs of costs and benefits. I’d like my students to learn something about the replicability crisis and its relevance to assessing these claims. The problem is that the great majority of college freshmen have had no exposure to statistics whatsoever. Hence, I’m looking for a self-contained discussion that does not rely heavily on statistical jargon. Last time I taught the course I sent the students a link to “What has happened down here is the winds have changed,” but even that was too technical for most of them. My question, then, is whether you have any articles to recommend.

My reply: I’m not sure. I guess it could make sense to start with some specific examples of unreplicated or unreplicable studies such as beauty and sex ratio, early childhood intervention (see here for a completely nontechnical version), shark attacks and voting, and elite performance in sports. Give students a choice of examples, and they can pick a topic that particularly interests them and pursue it further.

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