List of Psychology Research Reversals

Here is a list of bogus psychology research:

A medical reversal is when an existing treatment is found to actually be useless or harmful. Psychology has in recent years been racking up reversals: in fact only 40-65% of its classic social results were replicated, in the weakest sense of finding ‘significant’ results in the same direction. (Even in those that replicated, the average effect found was half the originally reported effect.) Such errors are far less costly to society than medical errors, but it’s still pollution, so here’s the cleanup. 1

Psychology is not alone: medicine, cancer biology, and economics all have many irreplicable results. It’d be wrong to write off psychology: we know about most of the problems here because of psychologists, and its subfields differ a lot by replication rate and effect-size shrinkage.

One reason psychology reversals are so prominent is that it’s an unusually ‘open’ field in terms of code and data sharing. A less scientific field would never have caught its own bullshit.

You might think that the controversial research would be that involving IQ and personality types. But that research has held up fairly well. Other areas have done much more poorly.