The Replication Crisis Lowers The Public’s Trust In Psychology — But Can That Trust Be Built Back Up?

By Matthew Warren

Often when we discuss the replication crisis in psychology, the main focus is on what it means for the research community — how do research practices need to change, for instance, or which sub-disciplines are most affected? These are all important questions, of course. But there’s another that perhaps receives less attention: what do the general public think about the field of psychology when they hear that supposedly key findings are not reproducible?

So a new paper in Social Psychological and Personality Science should make for concerning reading. Across a series of studies involving a total of almost 1,400 participants, the researchers find that not only do low rates of reproducibility decrease public trust in the field, but that it may also be tricky to build that trust up again.

In their first study, Tobias Wingen at the University of Cologne and colleagues gave participants a description of the Reproducibility Project, a large 2015 study in which researchers attempted to replicate the results of 100 psychology findings. That project found that while 97% of the original results showed a statistically significant effect, only 36% of the replications did. But the participants in the new study were not told about these results — instead, they were asked to guess how many studies had successfully replicated.  They also rated their trust in psychology, answering questions like “I trust the psychological science community to do what is right”.

On average, participants guessed that about 61 studies successfully replicated — much higher than the actual results of the project. But there was also a significant relationship between participants’ predictions and their trust in psychology: the lower their estimates of the number of successful replications, the lower their trust in the field.

Of course, these data are only correlational — but a subsequent study suggested that learning about poor reproducibility actually leads to lower trust. Participants again read descriptions of the Reproducibility Project, but this time they were told that a low, medium, or high number of the studies had replicated (39, 61 or 83 studies respectively). Those in the low reproducibility group subsequently rated their trust in psychology as significantly lower than those in the high reproducibility group.

Can this trust be regained? In further studies, the team didn’t have much luck on this front. In one, participants were given reasons for the low reproducibility rate: they were either told that it was due to researchers using questionable research practices like only publishing surprising results, or that it was because research is hard and small differences in studies can have a big impact on the findings. These participants didn’t rate their trust in psychology any differently from those who received no explanations.

Trust wasn’t even any better when participants read that research practices had improved since the original project showing low reproducibility. In the final two studies, some participants were told about ways that the field has recently become more open and transparent — in one study they were even given the (pretend) results of a new project, which supposedly showed that now 83% of recent papers could be successfully replicated. But these participants still didn’t rate their trust in psychology any higher than those who only read about the original project.

It perhaps won’t come as much of a surprise that replication failures can erode trust in psychology. But the more worrying finding is that that trust seems hard to repair. The researchers are at pains to highlight that their study doesn’t necessarily mean that there is no benefit in telling people the reasons behind poor reproducibility, or in explaining the ways that the field is becoming more transparent, as there could be small effects that their study didn’t pick up on. Still, they conclude, it also doesn’t provide any evidence that these strategies are effective.

Of course, reading a few sentences about research practices may not be sufficient to rebuild trust: perhaps more in-depth explanation and education could be useful. But on the other hand, most members of the public probably do get their psychology education from short snippets in news reports (and blogs!), similar to those used by the researchers.

So what’s the solution? We could just not tell people about failures to replicate — but as the authors rightly point out, “covering up low replicability is neither an ethical nor an effective way to handle the problem”. Instead, they suggest the first step may simply be to continue working on improving replicability in the field. Although it’s not yet clear whether this will have immediate effects on people’s perceptions, the study did show that the greater the rate of successful replications in the first place, the higher people’s trust, they write. “Thus, if replicability is constantly high, public trust in psychology might rise.”

– No Replication, No Trust? How Low Replicability Influences Trust in Psychology

Matthew Warren (@MattbWarren) is Editor of BPS Research Digest

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5 Things child psychology teaches us about children

Understanding the principles of child psychology has had an enormous influence on how we care for, treat and educate children today. We look at five of the main areas – and what each teaches us about how kids tick.

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What is coaching, and how is it used to help people?

Coaching is the second-fastest-growing industry in the world, but what does the coaching profession entail? We answer some of the questions you may have.

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We’re Not Great At Thinking About The Long-Term Consequences Of Catastrophes That Threaten Our Existence

By Matthew Warren

Imagine that tomorrow a catastrophe wipes out 99% of the world’s population. That’s clearly not a desirable scenario — we would all agree that a peaceful, continued existence is preferable. Now imagine that the disaster kills everyone, wiping out the human race. Most of us would rate that as an even worse occurrence.

But how do we see the relative severity of these different possibilities?  Is there a bigger difference between nothing happening and 99% of people dying, or between 99% and 100% of people being wiped out?

This thought-experiment was first posed by the philosopher Derek Parfit, who thought most people would believe the first difference is greater — after all, going from business-as-usual to almost total annihilation is a big step. He, on the other hand, felt the second difference was greater by far: even if just a tiny fraction of humans survive, civilisation could continue for millions of years, but if humanity is wiped from the face of the Earth, then it’s all over.

Now a new study in Scientific Reports has found that, like Parfit predicted, most people don’t seem to share his view of human extinction as a “uniquely bad” catastrophe — until they are forced to go beyond their gut feeling and reflect on what extinction really means in the long term.

First, Stefan Schubert and colleagues at the University of Oxford surveyed 183 Americans on their opinions on human extinction. Almost 80% believed extinction would be bad, and participants also strongly agreed that human extinction should be prevented and that we have a moral obligation to do so.

The researchers then gave 1,251 members of the British public five variations on Parfit’s thought experiment.  The first group were asked to rank the following three scenarios:

(A) There is no catastrophe.

(B) There is a catastrophe that immediately kills 80% of the world’s population.

(C) There is a catastrophe that immediately kills 100% of the world’s population.

Most participants ranked A as the best scenario and C as the worst.

The researchers then asked participants “In terms of badness, which difference is greater: the difference between A and B, or the difference between B and C?” Less than a quarter of people responded that that the difference between B and C was the greater of the two, suggesting that “most people did not find extinction uniquely bad”.

The researchers suggest this may be because people instinctively focus on the immediate victims of a catastrophe, and the leap from no deaths to 80% seems greater than that from 80% to 100%. So for two further groups they tweaked the scenarios to encourage participants to focus less on the fact that billions of people would be dying. In one, participants read that the catastrophes would sterilise people rather than kill them, and in the other they read that the catastrophes would affect zebras rather than humans. In these cases, around 45% rated extinction as uniquely bad (that is, they rated the difference between B and C greater than the difference between A and B) — significantly more than in the first group.

Finally, encouraging participants to focus on the long-term consequences of the scenarios led to an even greater number of people seeing extinction as uniquely bad. One group was explicitly asked to consider the fact that only the extinction scenario would leave no future for humanity, while another were told that if 80% of people died, the remaining population would recover and go on to form a utopian society. In this condition more than three-quarters of participants rated the B vs C difference as the greatest.

Overall, the results suggest that although we believe human extinction is a bad thing, it’s not until we’re forced to think beyond the immediate, short-term consequences that we tend to agree that extinction is a far worse outcome than any other. This was supported by the additional finding that people were more likely to consider B vs C  as the greater difference if they scored higher on a test measuring “cognitive reflection” — the ability to override gut instinct and reflect on the answer to a question. “This could mean that deliberative thought-processes lead to finding extinction uniquely bad, whereas intuitive thought-processes lead to the opposite conclusion,” the team writes.

Why does this real-world test of a philosophical thought experiment matter? We’re living in a time where climate change and technological progress puts humans at growing risk of extinction, say the researchers, yet we’re not doing enough to protect against these existential risks. The results suggest that there are cognitive biases in play that could partly explain why that’s the case, and that encouraging people to reflect more carefully might help overcome these. After all, the team conclude, “if it is right that human extinction is uniquely bad, then we should arguably invest much more in making sure it does not happen.”

– The Psychology of Existential Risk: Moral Judgments about Human Extinction

Matthew Warren (@MattbWarren) is Editor of BPS Research Digest

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People Who Try To Be Environmentally-Friendly By Buying Less Stuff Are Happier, Study Claims

By Emily Reynolds

With an ever-increasing focus on environmental sustainability, more and more of us are changing how — and what — we consume. We’re encouraged to recycle; charges on plastic mean we take our own shopping bags to the supermarket; and market research suggests that campaigns against fast fashion have been partly responsible for a rising interest in second-hand clothing. But how do these kinds of behaviours relate to our well-being? New research in Young Consumers suggests that buying green may not be the way to personal bliss, and that instead we should be focused on curbing our materialistic urges altogether.

To understand how our consumer choices affect our well-being, Sabrina Helm at the University of Arizona and her team looked at the “culturally entrenched materialistic values” that influence millennials. The researchers were interested in two specific kinds of behaviour:  “green buying”, which refers to buying products that limit impact on the environment, and reduced consumption, which involves repairing or reusing things rather than buying replacements.

The team started with data from a longitudinal research program in which almost 1,000 college students completed online surveys, initially during their first year, aged 18 to 21, and subsequently three and five years later. The students completed scales measuring their level of materialism, and how often they engaged in proactive financial behaviours such as saving. The team also constructed a 7-item scale to measure proactive environmental behaviours, including both green buying — such as purchasing items made from recycled materials — and reduced consumption behaviours. Personal well-being, life satisfaction, financial satisfaction and psychological distress were also measured.

Unsurprisingly, the results showed that the more materialistic a person was, the less likely they were to engage in reduced consumption. But they were still likely to engage in green buying — perhaps because it still involved obtaining new items.

“There is evidence that there are ‘green materialists,'” says Helm. “If you are able to buy environmentally friendly products, you can still live your materialist values. You’re acquiring new things, and that fits into the mainstream consumption pattern in our consumer culture.”

These materialists should think twice, however: those with lower levels of consumption also reported higher personal well-being and lower psychological distress, but green buying had no link to well-being at all.

“We thought it might satisfy people that they participated in being more environmentally conscious through green buying patterns, but it doesn’t seem to be that way,” Helm said. “Reduced consumption has effects on increased well-being and decreased psychological distress, but we don’t see that with green consumption.”

It’s important to note that the data gleaned from the research was not causal, but merely correlational. People with higher levels of materialism may be less happy for other reasons, or happy people may be more likely to engage in reduced consumption, not the other way around. And it’s also possible that those with high levels of materialism are unlikely to be made any happier by reducing their consumption — after all, the factors influencing that materialism are complex and often deeply embedded in the social and cultural fabric of our lives, and undoing these desires may be slightly less straightforward than we might hope. 

Changes in consumer habits are obviously not going to be the tipping point when it comes to climate change — as we probably all know by now, 71% of global emissions are caused by just 100 companies. So whilst Helm notes that reduced consumption is “more important from a sustainability perspective,” how much single use plastic we purchase on a daily basis is unlikely to make a significant impact.

But how we feel about these issues will undoubtedly develop as the clock ticks on climate change: understanding how to navigate our role in environmental issues is only going to get more pressing.

– Materialist values, financial and pro-environmental behaviors, and well-being

Emily Reynolds (@rey_z) is a staff writer at BPS Research Digest

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The 5 steps to becoming a life coach in South Africa

It's a career with a bright future, but how does one become a life coach? Here are 5 steps to succeeding in one of the world's fastest-growing industries.

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Here’s Why We Eat More When We’re With Friends And Family

By Emily Reynolds

Going home from dinner out with a friend or a Sunday family lunch, you may notice you feel slightly more full than you normally do after eating. And while some of this may have to do with how many potatoes your mum insists you eat, new research seems to suggest that there could be something else going on. Researchers analysing dozens of past studies on the “social facilitation” of eating have confirmed that people do tend to eat more when eating in groups than alone — and have come up with several social and psychological mechanisms that could explain our increase in consumption in company.

Helen Ruddock at the University of Birmingham and colleagues embarked on a meta-analysis of 42 studies on the social facilitation of eating, including experimental research, where participants were observed eating alone and with others, and non-experimental studies, where participants recorded consumption in a food diary.

The review confirmed past findings, suggesting that we eat more when we’re with friends or family and are more likely to moderate the way we eat when we’re with people we don’t know. In that case, rather than pigging out, we choose smaller portions and eat less.

In studies using diary techniques, meal sizes were between 29% and 48% larger when eating with friends than when alone: one study found that an average of 23% more calories were consumed when eating in company. Three studies also found greater social facilitation effects for fatty and protein-rich foods.

The analysis also uncovered additional social factors that influenced how much people ate. Women tended to eat smaller portions in front of men, whether they were strangers or friends, and overweight people ate smaller portions in public for fear of being seen to overeat — one study found these groups would eat 18% less food when with others.

“People want to convey positive impressions to strangers,” explains Ruddock. “Selecting small portions may provide a means of doing so, and this may be why the social facilitation of eating is less pronounced amongst groups of strangers.”

So why do we eat more when we’re with others? The team suggests it could be to do with the way our ancestors ate food, sharing it to protect against future food insecurity. Thousands of years on, many of us have no problem accessing food, but the mechanism remains.

Or as the team put it, the “recent and rapid transition to a dietary landscape in which food is abundant has created forms of evolutionary mismatch… in the case of social facilitation, we have inherited a mechanism that ensured equitable food distribution but which now exerts a powerful influence on unhealthy dietary intakes.”

There are more obvious social factors, too: eating with others is, simply put, fun, and we therefore receive an “enhanced reward from social eating”, leading us to potentially over-consume. Overeating in company is also viewed less negatively than doing so alone, giving us permission to eat more with others. And if you’re a regular chef for friends and family, you’re likely to associate providing food with praise, giving you a self-esteem boost and strengthening relationships.

So next time you feel guilty about overindulging with friends? Fear not — you were simply strengthening your social bonds.

– A systematic review and meta-analysis of the social facilitation of eating

Emily Reynolds (@rey_z) is a staff writer at BPS Research Digest

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Technology-Facilitated Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse (CSEA): the ‘Flaw in the Law’

Recent figures suggest that the number of young people falling victim to sexual abuse online continues to rise. Given the substantial impact such experiences can have, we are challenging whether current legislation understands the true nature of such offending and reflects the actual harm caused. The rise in ‘online grooming’ According to recent figures published by the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC), over 5,000 offenses of ‘online grooming’ were recorded in the 18 months prior to March 2019. Thus, compared to the same period of the previous year, the...

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Talking Nonsense And Being Humble: The Week’s Best Psychology Links

Our weekly round-up of the best psychology coverage from elsewhere on the web

A recent review has found that there are many good reasons to be humble, writes Benedict Carey in The New York Times. People who score higher on humility are more curious and open-minded, for instance, and less aggressive towards people with different beliefs.

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How can the same joke have one person in hysterics but leave another just rolling their eyes? Sophie Scott explores why humour is so subjective over at The Conversation.

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We’re surprisingly adept at concentrating on a single person’s speech when there are other conversations going on around us — a phenomenon known as the “cocktail party effect”.  Now a new study has revealed what’s going on in the brain as we filter out these distracting sounds to focus on a single speaker, Katherine Ellen Foley reports at Quartz — work that could one day help develop better hearing aids.

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We all have that friend who plays fast and loose with the facts in their conversations. But why do they do it? In The Guardian’s “Science Weekly” podcast, Ian Sample talks to psychologists who are trying to understand the mind of the bullshitter (and check out this Digest piece on a paper from one of the podcast guests, John Petrocelli).

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Claims that social media is “destroying a generation” are misplaced, writes Lydia Denworth at Scientific American. The story takes a look at some of the the flaws of early research into the effects of digital technology — and explores how researchers are now attempting to conduct more rigorous studies that get into the nuances of media use.

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Finally, babies appear to have some kind of sense of counting long before they can actually count out loud, according to this story on BBC Science Focus. The researchers found that even 14-month-olds seem to understand that particular number words are associated with specific quantities. Scroll down to the end of the piece for an adorable video of the research.

Compiled by Matthew Warren (@MattbWarren), Editor of BPS Research Digest

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When Does The Present Become The Future? It Depends Who You Ask

By Emma Young

In 2017, in my first ever post for the Digest, I wrote about a paper that challenged the popular idea that “now” — also known as the “subjective present” — is three seconds long. It’s just not possible to define the present so strictly, this review concluded.

Instead of trying to explore what constitutes “right now”, another way to get at our conceptions of time is to ask: when does the present end and the future begin? And precisely this question has now been explored in a series of studies by Hal Hershfield at UCLA and Sam Maglio at the University of Toronto. In their paper, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, the pair report that these perceptions can vary substantially between people — and can affect the kinds of choices that we make, with potentially significant implications for our future lives.

In the first of five studies, the pair asked 199 online participants to write down, “without giving it too much thought, off the top of your head,” when they felt the present to end. They found that the responses fell into a wide range of duration categories (ranging from “right now” to “longer than a year” and “at some future event”). One fifth thought that the present ended “right now”. Another 18% indicated a time between 1 second and 1 minute from the present moment; in total, almost half considered the present to end some time within the next hour. However, some participants had a much longer time-frame in mind, with 15% reporting that it ended at some future event (often indicated as being “at my own death”).

The second study, on a fresh batch of participants, returned a very similar range of reports, but, importantly, it also showed that each participant’s view remained pretty consistent over a four-month period. This suggests that there are stable individual differences between people in when they feel that the future starts, the researchers write.

However, they did also find that external factors can influence these perceptions, and subsequent decisions. When participants were prompted to see the present as short, and the future as coming sooner — by showing them a horizontal bar with markers labelled “present ends” and “future starts” only a short way along it, for instance — they tended to make more far-sighted, future-focused choices, opting to read tips about how to save money for the future, for example.

For a more real-world investigation, Hershfield and Maglio partnered with a “financial wellness program” at UCLA. This programme offers financial literacy bootcamps, which are advertised via flyers emailed to programme members. The researchers were allowed to modify these flyers, so that one version read “The present is short and the future starts sooner: Acquire better financial habits today!”, and the other “The present is long and the future starts later. Acquire better financial habits today!”. Horizontal bars matched the messages, with the future marked as starting sooner on the first version, and later on the second. 

To enrol in the financial literacy bootcamp, programme members had to click on a link within the email, allowing the researchers to establish which of the registrants had seen which flyer. “In line with our hypothesis, the short present flyer prompted significantly more people to enrol … compared with the long present condition,” they report.

In the final study, the researchers found that when the present was framed as being short (and so the future as coming sooner), participants were more likely to choose gift cards that allowed them to save for the future, rather than ones that could be used for immediate purchases.

“We contend that people can experience the passage of time as the self jumping through a never-ending succession of temporal bubbles, each of which consists of a new present,” the researchers write. It also seems that though these bubbles are not the same size for all of us, their size is susceptible to external influence.

“We are careful to note that this research represents a first step toward what we hope is a more complete understanding of how people partition the present and the future, how such partitions affect choice, and the mechanisms accounting for these relationships,” Hershfield and Maglio add.

– When does the present end and the future begin?

Emma Young (@EmmaELYoung) is a staff writer at BPS Research Digest

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