Double trouble? The communication dimension of the reproducibility crisis in experimental psychology and neuroscience
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Double trouble? The communication dimension of the reproducibility crisis in experimental psychology and neuroscience Witold M. Hensel 1 Received: 31 December 2019 / Accepted: 18 September 2020 / Published online: 1 October 2020 # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Most discussions of the reproducibility crisis focus on its epistemic aspect: the fact that the scientific community fails to follow some norms of scientific investigation, which leads to high rates of irreproducibility via a high rate of false positive findings. The purpose of this paper is to argue that there is a heretofore underappreciated and understudied dimension to the reproducibility crisis in experimental psychology and neuroscience that may prove to be at least as important as the epistemic dimension. This is the communication dimension. The link between communication and reproducibility is immediate: independent investigators would not be able to recreate an experiment whose design or implementation were inadequately described. I exploit evidence of a replicability and reproducibility crisis in computational science, as well as research into quality of reporting to support the claim that a widespread failure to adhere to reporting standards, especially the norm of descriptive completeness, is an important contributing factor in the current reproducibility crisis in experimental psychology and neuroscience. Keywords Reproducibility crisis in experimental psychology and neuroscience .
Replicability crisis in computational modeling . Replication . Reproduction . Norms of scientific reporting . Descriptive completeness
1 Introduction The reproducibility crisis is usually depicted as resulting from a failure to follow some norms of scientific investigation (but see, e.g., Bird 2018). If sufficiently widespread, this failure can cause a proliferation of false positive findings in the literature, which This article belongs to the Topical Collection: Philosophical Perspectives on the Replicability Crisis Guest Editors: Mattia Andreoletti, Jan Sprenger
* Witold M. Hensel [email protected]
1
Institute of Philosophy, University of Bialystok, Bialystok, Poland
44 Page 2 of 22
European Journal for Philosophy of Science (2020) 10: 44
can lead to low research reproducibility because false findings are mostly irreproducible. For example, many authors have argued that researchers in psychology, including journal editors and referees, tend to confuse nominal statistical significance of an experimental finding with its epistemic import (e.g., Rosenthal & Gaito 1963; Neuliep & Crandall 1990, 1993; Sterling 1959; Sterling, Rosenbaum, & Weinkam 1995; Gigerenzer 2004, 2018). In effect, the psychological literature has been filling up over the years with statistically significant results, most of which are probably false. The problem is serious as most psychology papers use null hypothesis significance testing (NHST) and over 90% of them report positive findings (Fanelli 2010). However, besides the norms of scientific investigation, there are no
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