
Crisis of replicability of results in contemporary experimental psychology in the light of the criteria of replicability in contemporary physics
Author(s) -
Slobodan Perović
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
theoria
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2406-081X
pISSN - 0351-2274
DOI - 10.2298/theo1901069p
Subject(s) - impossibility , phenomenon , epistemology , field (mathematics) , psychology , experimental psychology , physics , theoretical physics , philosophy , mathematics , political science , law , neuroscience , pure mathematics , cognition
Since 2010, the impossibility of replicating experimental results (published in leading journals in the field) in a number of repeated psychological experiments began to be increasingly perceived as a methodological crisis. Replicability is generally considered to be the basic standard of scientific experiments, modeled on exemplary classical experiments in the field of physics. But the conditions of replicability vary depending on the studied phenomenon in physics itself, and therefore the criteria for the adequacy of the experiment vary as well. Three characteristic examples of experiments we analyze led to three different epistemic attitudes of their adequacy based on the replicability of the results. We argue that these attitudes can be relevant in understanding the nature of the crisis of replicability in psychology.