Metascience could rescue the 'replication crisis'

摘要

If you witness a bank robbery, what should you do? Tell the police what you saw? And then volunteer to identify the arrested suspect in a line-up? That sounds like the right response, but it might not be. Almost 25 years ago, a colleague and I published a psychology study (J. W. Schooler and T. Y. Engstler-Schooler Cogn. Psychol. 22, 36-71; 1990) that indicated that to describe the physical appearance of the criminal could make it harder for a witness to subsequently identify the person they saw.