I’ve written several times about the dismal reproducibility rate of experiments in Psychology. Mostly that’s been in support of my contention that “Tech Addiction” is a nonexistent problem made up by journalists looking for something to write about and supported—when it’s supported at all—by what amounts to junk science on the part of Psychology profession.
There is ample reason to be skeptical of any “study” in Psychology as even the profession itself is coming to realize. The Atlantic is running an article entitled Psychology’s Replication Crisis Is Running Out of Excuses that takes a look at the problem and concludes that it’s very real. The best quote from the article is, “Ironically enough, it seems that one of the most reliable findings in psychology is that only half of psychological studies can be successfully repeated.”
The article recounts the findings of the Many Labs 2 project which set out to carefully reproduce some of the most important research findings in the field. It was designed to answer the criticisms of those who say the crisis is not real and has mundane explanations. If you have any interest in this at all, you should definitely read the Atlantic piece but the TL;DR is that efforts to reproduce 28 of Psychology’s most important results—those that are in text books or the subject of TED talks—succeeded in only 14 cases. The meaning of that is that we could save a lot of grant dollars by simply flipping a coin; we wouldn’t be any less accurate. Or even better, maybe we’d stop hearing about cell phone addiction. But probably not.