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What findings do skeptical psychologists still believe in, after replication crisis?

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https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/...believe-in

EXCERPT: . . . In recent years, however, high-profile tests of findings in psychology have sent shivers of doubt through the ranks of psychologists. One effort after another to replicate past results has found that many of the studies that replication teams choose to repeat do not yield consistent outcomes.

The resulting “replication crisis”—with its implication that many of psychology’s published findings might not actually reflect real phenomena—has had an impact on scientists who study human behavior. Many are taking steps to change how research is conducted, aiming in part to make findings more likely to hold up under scrutiny. (In the latest issue of Psychology Today, four of these scientists share their views of how the drive for change started and where it stands today.) Some are now hard-pressed, in the absence of thorough testing, to say which findings are reliable or not.

But there are results that they do trust—many of them. We asked scientists who have taken part in efforts to reform psychological research to talk about some examples of important findings (or sets of findings) in which they have faith.

The finding: Personality traits are largely stable in adults. ... The finding that, over time, individual adults are fairly (though not totally) consistent in how high or low they rate on these traits “is one of the largest and most robust effects in all of psychology” [...]

The finding: People are swayed by what they think most of the group thinks. ... “These effects are at the heart of social psychology, in the sense of reflecting some of the most basic ways in which an individual is influenced by other people” ... They also suggest real-world consequences: The more acceptable prejudiced comments seem to others, for instance, the more inclined someone will likely be to make them. Importantly, however, research also suggests that what we imagine others think is related to what we ourselves think. A replication test recently affirmed two iterations of a classic finding called the false consensus effect. [...]

The findings: People seek, in subtle ways, to confirm their preexisting beliefs. And in hindsight, they overestimate how predictable an event was. Though distinct, both confirmation bias and hindsight bias are related in that they are “centrally relevant to the reform movement in science." ... With confirmation bias, we are more likely to seek and interpret information in ways that reinforce our existing beliefs rather than challenge them. This is evident in everyday human activity (see politics, all of it), and in scientific research.” As we read the news or watch political shows, we may unwittingly filter what we’re seeing and hearing based on a belief that a particular idea is brilliant or stupid or that a particular person is innocent or guilty. Scientists are people, too—and when they already believe a scientific hypothesis is true, they are at risk of approaching the evidence in a way that backs up that belief without testing it as rigorously as they could. [...]

The finding: Choices are influenced by how the options are framed. ... A heightened preference for the same option framed in positive rather than negative terms is one of a suite of phenomena outlined in research by psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. “Every restaurant menu in a decent restaurant is using tons of this psychology,” Simmons says. This kind of finding can have significant [civil] policy applications, too. ... “I still think so much of what’s being published in our field is not true,” says Simmons ... “I think psychology has a very big problem. But we’ve been around long enough that we have a very big body of literature that is true.” [...]

The finding: Some people will defer to authority even if it means harming a stranger. . . . Reanalysis of the research has indicated that only some participants fully believed Milgram’s set-up, so it may be that fewer participants than it seemed were genuinely complying with instructions to harm. But ... the essential descriptive finding—a greater level of compliance than we might anticipate—is likely to be true. It has yet to be seriously undermined by a high-quality replication study, she says, and more recent efforts to repeat it have offered some supporting evidence. [...]

The finding: People may recall seeing something they didn’t. ... Memory is far from perfect, and psychologists have supplied evidence that people can be induced to recall invented details of past observations or experiences. Such findings have implications for how we interpret highly consequential memories, such as those of eyewitnesses or those that have supposedly been repressed and recovered. There are multiple false memory effects “that you can bet your tenure on”.

The finding: The scientific community has some ability to anticipate which findings will hold up. Another insight from recent tests of psychology results is that researchers, in aggregate, are better than chance at predicting which ones are most likely to be replicated. ... Markets have been used in this way several times now, “evidence of some wisdom of the crowd, and also that there is something systematic about results that replicate versus those that do not” [...] (MORE - details)
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