[From the article, “Psychology’s Replication Crisis Is Running Out of Excuses” By Ed Yong, published in The Atlantic]

“The Many Labs 2 project was specifically designed to address these criticisms. With 15,305 participants in total, the new experiments had, on average, 60 times as many volunteers as the studies they were attempting to replicate. The researchers involved worked with the scientists behind the original studies to vet and check every detail of the experiments beforehand. And they repeated those experiments many times over, with volunteers from 36 different countries, to see if the studies would replicate in some cultures and contexts but not others.”

“…Despite the large sample sizes, and the blessings of the original teams, the team failed to replicate half of the studies they focused on.”

“…Likewise, Many Labs 2 ‘was explicitly designed to examine how much effects varied from place to place, from culture to culture,’ says Katie Corker, the chair of the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science. ‘And here’s the surprising result: The results do not show much variability at all.’ If one of the participating teams successfully replicated a study, others did, too. If a study failed to replicate, it tended to fail everywhere.”

“It’s worth dwelling on this, because it’s a serious blow to one the most frequently cited criticisms of the ‘reproducibility crisis’ rhetoric. Surely, skeptics argue, it’s a fantasy to expect studies to replicate everywhere. ‘There’s a massive deference to the sample,’ says Nosek. ‘Your replication attempt failed? It must be because you did it in Ohio and I did it in Virginia, and people are different. But these results suggest that we can’t just wave those failures away very easily.’”

To read more, click here.