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Category: Project

Description: What explanation is there when teams of researchers are unable to successfully replicate already established ‘canonical’ findings? One suggestion put forward, but left largely untested, has been that those researchers who fail to replicate other studies are of lower ‘caliber’, lacking the expertise and skill necessary to successfully replicate such experiments. Here we empirically test the validity of those claims across 79 laboratories of differing ‘caliber’ replicating four different studies. Using a bibliometric tool as our indicator of ‘caliber’, we find absolutely no empirical evidence for the researcher ‘caliber’ and reproducibility hypothesis. Claims are now being put forward to explain replication failures in psychological science. These hypotheses carry a lot of potential for explaining scientists’ behavior. The results, however, do not uphold the hypotheses; alternate explanations instead should be sought for explaining replication failure.