Grand Challenges for Personality and Social Psychology: Moving beyond the Replication Crisis

摘要

The replication crisis has shaken the field of personality and social psychology in the past few years, after finding out that well-known effects that we have taken for granted failed to replicate (see, e.g., Marsman et al., 2017). This has happened partly due to reliance on flawed research conduct, such as confusing exploratory and confirmatory statistical tests (e.g., Wagenmakers et al., 2012). But such conduct was not created in a vacuum. It has arisen under pressure to show surprising, mesmerizing findings as a requirement for publication in highly selective journals in the quest for career survival and progression. Much has been written about solutions that would ensure that future research is replicable and reproducible (e.g., Fraley and Vazire, 2014; Nosek et al., 2015; Simonsohn, 2015), including in our journal (e.g., Everett and Earp, 2015) and in the current Research Topic on “Grand Challenges in Psychology” (Stevens, 2017). Things are still changing rapidly, with recent solutions already being questioned (e.g., pre-registration practices, see Wicherts and Veldkamp, 2017). We therefore do not wish to re-iterate what has been written so eloquently by others (e.g., Stevens, 2017). Instead, we only wish to highlight a few ways in which publishing in Frontiers can help overcome this crisis and we then move on to discuss research avenues that we believe would particularly enhance knowledge and understanding in personality and social psychology.