Practice question · Multiple choice
Large replication projects found a substantial share of published psychology findings did not reproduce. Why is that better read as the field working than as the field failing?
Hints
- Ask who ran the replication projects, and what they had to gain.
- Compare a field that discovers its false positives with one that never looks.
Show the answer
A. Because self-correction is what distinguishes a science
Why
The failures were found by the field auditing itself, which is the mechanism working rather than breaking. What followed — preregistration, open data, registered reports — are structural fixes, and the honest reading is that psychology found a problem most disciplines have not yet gone looking for.
Practise Contemporary Trends
The app has 4 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. Psychology I is free to start.
More questions on Contemporary Trends
- Select every statement that is TRUE about contemporary psychology.
- Match each concrete description to the contemporary concept it names.
- Positive psychology studies flow, resilience and well-being rather than disorder. Critics call it a…
- Preregistration asks researchers to commit to their hypotheses and analysis plan before collecting data.…
- Order the events by which the replication crisis reshaped research practice.
- Sort each idea as a positive-psychology concept or a methodological reform.
- Positive psychology is often dismissed as optimism and self-help. What distinguishes it from that?