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Complex phenomena require sophisticated designs: Why we should not give up on replicability
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Description: In an article in Frontiers in Psychology, titled “Reproducibility in psychological science: When do psychological phenomena exist”, the author argues that science cannot prove a negative, and that psychological phenomena are often subtle and fleeting. To him, this means that psychologists should conduct conceptual, rather than direct replications, and explore boundary conditions rather than the existence of replicable effects. To us, this position seems unreasonable, and we argue that study designs should match the phenomena under investigation – which, in the face of complexity, may be different than what we are accustomed to.