The replication crisis: five years later

Five years since the big Reproducibility Project results. Social psychology had a reckoning. Where are we now? Better? Worse? Just different?

Better, but uncomfortably. We lost some beloved findings — ego depletion, power posing, most of the priming literature. It hurt. But the field is more honest now.

Pre-registration is standard. Sample sizes are larger. Journals publish null results. All good changes. But the incentive structure still rewards novel findings over replications.

In developmental psych we had our own reckoning. A lot of the 'critical period' findings were based on tiny samples. When you rerun them with proper power, the effects are real but much smaller.

The meta-science insight that stuck with me: a field that only publishes positive results will be wrong more often than right. Publication bias was the original sin, and we're still atoning.

The silver lining is that the findings that survived replication are genuinely robust. We have a smaller but sturdier foundation to build on. Quality over quantity.