RE: Crisis in Psychology?
April 27, 2022 at 8:33 pm
(This post was last modified: April 27, 2022 at 9:19 pm by John 6IX Breezy.)
I want to add an argument given the above paper: That what is described as a replication crisis is more accurately described as a generalizability crisis.
Science has always had a problem with induction: The very act of experimentation isolates nature such that it requires generalizations to say anything beyond a lab. Newton's laws of motion, for example, are generalizations made about the universe drawn from a handful of localized observations. So I would compare the "unsuccessful" replication studies in psychology that were sampled from a population that differed from the original, to a chemist that fails to replicate the boiling point of water, yet makes his observations at a different altitude than the original. The issue isn't replication here, it's the generalizability of scientific observations.
Science has always had a problem with induction: The very act of experimentation isolates nature such that it requires generalizations to say anything beyond a lab. Newton's laws of motion, for example, are generalizations made about the universe drawn from a handful of localized observations. So I would compare the "unsuccessful" replication studies in psychology that were sampled from a population that differed from the original, to a chemist that fails to replicate the boiling point of water, yet makes his observations at a different altitude than the original. The issue isn't replication here, it's the generalizability of scientific observations.
