The Psychonomic Society has been hosting an interesting blog series on pre-registration. Below are the five blogs with ridiculously brief, and probably misleading, summaries:

Stephen Lindsay (“Arguments for Preregistering Psychology Research”) SUMMARY: Proper interpretation of the results from hypothesis testing require specific, pre-registered tests.

Klaus Oberauer (“Preregistration of a forking path – What does it add to the garden of evidence?”) SUMMARY: If everybody would just make their data available, there wouldn’t be a need for pre-registration.

Richard Morey (“You must tug that thread: why treating preregistration as a gold standard might incentivize poor behavior”) SUMMARY: Pre-registration allows “bad” scientists to get away with not doing robustness checking

Danielle Navarro (“Prediction, pre-specification and transparency”) SUMMARY: Pre-registration tries to simultaneously satisfy three different goals: to make predictions (i.e., avoiding hindsight bias); to adhere to the statistical assumptions of confirmatory testing; and to provide transparency.  Unappreciated is that these different goals require different specifications of pre-registrations. Further, in the case of transparency, pre-registration may not be the best tool for the job.

Iris van Rooij (“Psychological science needs theory development before preregistration”) SUMMARY: Pre-registration distracts from the more important business of theory building.

We should also add to this mix the recent Guest Blog from Nathan Goodman at TRN (“Hold the Bus!”) where he questions what seems like blind faith in pre-registration:

Where is the evidence that pre-registration works? That there are more null results? Is that the correct indicator of good science? Are there, in fact, ANY measurables that will enable us to know that pre-registration is producing better science? Those are good questions to which there have not been a lot of good answers to date.