Rebuilding After the Replication Crisis

Tue, 3 Oct 2023 19:46:18 +1100

Andrew Pam <xanni [at] glasswings.com.au>

Andrew Pam
<https://asteriskmag.com/issues/01/rebuilding-after-the-replication-crisis>

"An empty room with a large cardboard box in the center. A group of 102
undergrad students. They’re split into three groups, and asked to sit either in
the box, beside the box or in the room with the box removed. They complete a
task that’s supposed to measure creativity — coming up with words that link
together three seemingly unrelated terms.

The results of this experiment? The students who sat beside the box had higher
scores on the test than the ones in the box or those with no box present.
That’s because — according to the researchers — sitting next to the box
activated in the students’ minds the metaphor “thinking outside the box.” And
this, through some unknown psychological mechanism, boosted their creativity.

You might be laughing at this absurd-sounding experiment. You might even think
I just made it up. But I didn’t: It was published as part of a real study — one
that the editors and reviewers at one of the top psychology journals,
Psychological Science, deemed excellent enough to publish back in 2012.

To my knowledge, nobody has ever attempted to replicate this study — to repeat
the same result in their own lab, with their own cardboard box. That’s perhaps
no surprise: After all, psychology research is infamous for having undergone a
“replication crisis.” That was the name that came to describe the
realization — around the same time that the cardboard box study was
published — that hardly any psychologists were bothering to do those
all-important replication studies. Why check the validity of one another’s
findings when, instead, we could be pushing on to make new and exciting
discoveries?"

Via Future Crunch:
<https://futurecrunch.com/good-news-endometriosis-poverty-mexico-indigenous-canada/>

Cheers,
       *** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net               Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/                 Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/            Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/               Manager, Serious Cybernetics

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