In other cases, scientists may want to replicate the experiment to further demonstrate the results.

The only way science is successful and credible is if it is self-critical,” he notes. Academic journals and the press regularly serve up fresh helpings of fascinating psychological research findings. Other studies have been reevaluated for more honest, methodological snafus. So why are psychology results so difficult to replicate? You have to be temporarily wrong, perhaps many times, before you are ever right.”Across the sciences, research is considered reproducible when an independent team can conduct a published experiment, following the original methods as closely as possible, and get the same results. While some might be tempted to look at the results of such replication projects and assume that psychology is rubbish, many suggest that such findings actually help make psychology a stronger science. I hope going forward that the universities and funding agencies responsible for incentivizing this research—and the media outlets covering them—will realize that they've been part of the problem, and that devaluing replication in this way has created a less stable literature than we'd like.”Brian Handwerk is a freelance writer based in Amherst, New Hampshire.

Across the six major replication projects, 90 of 190 findings (47%) have been replicated successfully according to each study’s primary evaluation criterion. Verywell Mind uses only high-quality sources, including peer-reviewed studies, to support the facts within our articles.

Replication is a term referring to the repetition of a Of the original studies, 97% of the findings were deemed statistically significant.

But how many of those experiments would produce the same results a second time around?The eye-opening results don't necessarily mean that those original findings were incorrect or that the scientific process is flawed.
Human thought and behavior is a remarkably subtle and ever-changing subject to study, so variations are to be expected when observing diverse populations and participants. Kendra Cherry, MS, is an author, educational consultant, and speaker focused on helping students learn about psychology.
Once a study has been conducted, researchers might be interested in determining if the results hold true in other settings or for other populations.

By In 2015, a group of 271 researchers published the results of their five-year effort to replicate 100 different experimental studies previously published in three top psychology journals. Does that mean that the experimenters conducted bad research or that, even worse, they lied or fabricated their data? The Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman has suggested that because published studies are often too vague in describing methods used, replications should involve the authors of the original studies in order to more carefully mirror the methods and procedures used in the original research. The field of psychology has been experiencing a “replication crisis” in recent years. When replicating earlier researchers, experimenters will follow the same procedures but with a different group of participants. Unfortunately there are disincentives to pursuing this kind of research, he says: “To get hired and promoted in academia, you must publish original research, so direct replications are rarer. Researchers might strive to perfectly reproduce the original study, but variations are expected and often impossible to avoid. So what happens if the original results cannot be reproduced? Of the 100 experiments in question, 61% could not be replicated with the original results. “Overall, our study shows statistically significant scientific findings should be interpreted rather cautiously until they have been replicated, even if they have been … Sign up to find out more in our Healthy Mind newsletter.