The Effect of the Reproducibility Movement in Social Psychology

Andrew Gelman (whose paper on the “Garden of the Forking Paths” we read at the start of this course), together with Simmons and Simonsohn (here at Penn) have for years helped bring attention to the ability for adaptive data analysis (p-hacking) to lead to false discovery. Their blogs have often done this by picking apart the methodology of high profile papers. The New York Times has an in depth history of this movement, with a focus on the social upheaval it caused amongst the social psychology community itself, and particularly for the authors of flawed studies that were held up as examples.