Commentary: Reproducibility in Psychological Science: When Do Psychological Phenomena Exist?
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Plain English Summary
This punchy commentary fires back at a researcher who claimed psychology shouldn't worry too much about replication (repeating studies to see if results hold up) because humans are just too complicated. Heino, Fried, and LeBel aren't having it. Their counterargument is delightful in its bluntness: if we abandon the requirement that findings be reproducible, psychology basically becomes astrology. Ouch. They point out that ecology, biology, and physics deal with enormously complex systems too, yet still manage to hold themselves to replication standards. The real takeaway? Complexity isn't an excuse to lower the bar -- it's a reason to design smarter studies, like tracking the same individuals over time instead of relying on one-shot group snapshots. The parallel to parapsychology is striking, since psi researchers often face the same argument that their effects are too context-dependent to replicate reliably.
Research Notes
CORRECTED Session 47: Catalog originally listed this as Mossbridge (2017) "Examining Psi: The Challenge of Open Science" — completely wrong. The PDF on disk is actually Heino, Fried & LeBel (2017), a general psychology replicability commentary with no psi content. Retained in library because the complexity-vs-replicability debate directly parallels arguments in parapsychology about elusive/context-dependent psi effects.
Short commentary responding to Iso-Ahola (2017) who argued that falsifiability and replication are of secondary importance to scientific progress and that psychological phenomena are inherently not fully reproducible because humans are irreducibly complex. Heino, Fried, and LeBel counter that complexity should motivate more sophisticated study designs (person-level time series, within-person repeated measures) rather than abandoning replicability standards. They argue that falsification is what makes science self-correcting, and that without rigorous direct replications psychology turns into astrology. They cite successful complexity science in ecology, biology, and physics as evidence that complexity and replicability are compatible.
Links
Related Papers
Companion
- An Agenda for Purely Confirmatory Research — Wagenmakers, Eric-Jan (2012)
- False-Positive Psychology: Undisclosed Flexibility in Data Collection and Analysis Allows Presenting Anything as Significant — Simmons, Joseph P (2011)
- Editors' Introduction to the Special Section on Replicability in Psychological Science: A Crisis of Confidence? — Pashler, Harold (2012)
- Why Most Published Research Findings Are False — Ioannidis, John P.A (2005)
- Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect — Bem, Daryl J (2011)
- Measuring the Prevalence of Questionable Research Practices With Incentives for Truth Telling — John, Leslie K (2012)
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📋 Cite this paper
Heino, Matti T. J, Fried, Eiko I, LeBel, Etienne P (2017). Commentary: Reproducibility in Psychological Science: When Do Psychological Phenomena Exist?. Frontiers in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01004
@article{heino_2017_reproducibility,
title = {Commentary: Reproducibility in Psychological Science: When Do Psychological Phenomena Exist?},
author = {Heino, Matti T. J and Fried, Eiko I and LeBel, Etienne P},
year = {2017},
journal = {Frontiers in Psychology},
doi = {10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01004},
}