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Category: Project

Description: For the past few years, psychology as a science has been in crisis. Several large-scale replication projects have brought to light that the replicability of psychological findings leaves much to be desired. Several reasons have been identified for this low replicability (publication bias; low power; [unintentional] p-hacking; …) and solutions have been proposed (preregistration of sample size, hypotheses, study design, and analyses; publication irrelevant of results; sharing of data and analyses; …). Unfortunately, the field of Work & Organizational Psychology seems to have largely missed this entire discussion. The past three years at the WAOP conference have shown little to no increase in presentations on preregistered projects (0, 2, 3 by my counting; all coming from the same research group). It is unlikely to assume that our field does not suffer from the same problems as more experimental fields, but I do recognize that we face some additional challenges that need to be discussed. Nevertheless, at the end of the day science should be a system of organized skepticism and we need to be able to scrutinize the claims made in published papers. I argue that this is not possible right now and the wide-spread adoption of open science practices is the only way forward for our field. In this session, I will summarize problems of the old way of doing science and discuss potential solutions and their feasibility in our field. I will also try to show tangible examples from our research group in which we have preregistered every confirmatory PhD study in the last three years. I will limit myself to practices that can be adopted by individual researchers/research groups, and mostly leave out grand-scale solutions at the editorial/organizational level. Afterwards, we will discuss any questions, reservations, and disagreements by participants at the round table.