Essential Psychology
Third Edition
Chapter Summary
There is now a widespread and growing concern that false positives may be far more prevalent in the field of psychology than ever was feared possible. Research practices and culture in psychological research are either not sufficient for, or even discourage, careful, methodical and reproducible research. Questionable research practices such as ‘p-hacking’ are prevalent and have a large detrimental effect on the reliability of reported results. Replication studies are rarely carried out, and current systems such as peer review seem to be inadequate to weed out studies with questionable data or methodology. However, many changes can be made to encourage good practices and increase the number of replication studies.