ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2019
Replicator degrees of freedom allow publication of misleading failures to replicate.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 21 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
21 citing papers in PubMed.
- Peer-Modeled Mindsets: An Approach to Customizing Life Sciences Studying Interventions.CBE life sciences education · 2022Trial
- Reflections on Conducting a Large Replication Project in Sports and Exercise Science.Sports medicine (Auckland, N.Z.) · 2025Review
- Assessment of Replicability and Efforts to Refine an Operant Conditioning Procedure for Larval Zebrafish.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2024Article
- Toward a more credible assessment of the credibility of science by many-analyst studies.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Identifying and Minimizing Incentives for Competing Interests in Sports Medicine Publications.Sports medicine (Auckland, N.Z.) · 2024Article
- High replicability of newly discovered social-behavioural findings is achievable.Nature human behaviour · 2024Article
- Replicability of simulation studies for the investigation of statistical methods: the RepliSims project.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Unraveling controversies over civic honesty measurement: An extended field replication in China.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- A values-aligned intervention fosters growth mindset-supportive teaching and reduces inequality in educational outcomes.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Efficiently exploring the causal role of contextual moderators in behavioral science.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Behavioural science is unlikely to change the world without a heterogeneity revolution.Nature human behaviour · 2021Review
- Synthesizing evidence in sustainability science through harmonized experiments: Community monitoring in common pool resources.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Evidence against subliminal anchoring: Two close, highly powered, preregistered, and failed replication attempts.Journal of experimental social psychology · 2021Article
- Infection threat shapes our social instincts.Behavioral ecology and sociobiology · 2021Review
- Science as collaborative knowledge generation.The British journal of social psychology · 2021Article
- Science is not a signal detection problem.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
- Replication and the Establishment of Scientific Truth.Frontiers in psychology · 2020Review
- Replicator degrees of freedom allow publication of misleading failures to replicate.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2019Article
- Machine Learning in Psychometrics and Psychological Research.Frontiers in psychology · 2019Article
- Why Meta-Analyses of Growth Mindset and Other Interventions Should Follow Best Practices for Examining Heterogeneity: Commentary on Macnamara and Burgoyne (2023) and Burnette et al. (2023).Psychological bulletinArticle
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
In recent years, the field of psychology has begun to conduct replication tests on a large scale. Here, we show that "replicator degrees of freedom" make it far too easy to obtain and publish false-negative replication results, even while appearing to adhere to strict methodological standards. Specifically, using data from an ongoing debate, we show that commonly exercised flexibility at the experimental design and data analysis stages of replication testing can make it appear that a finding was not replicated when, in fact, it was. The debate that we focus on is representative, on key dimensions, of a large number of other replication tests in psychology that have been published in recent years, suggesting that the lessons of this analysis may be far reaching. The problems with current practice in replication science that we uncover here are particularly worrisome because they are not adequately addressed by the field's standard remedies, including preregistration. Implications for how the field could develop more effective methodological standards for replication are discussed.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.