Three Ways to Tell If Research Is Bunk

Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out.

We live in interesting times for the social sciences. For the past several decades, disciplines such as social psychology and behavioral economics seemed to unlock many of the mysteries of human life, and academics and laypeople alike couldn’t get enough of what they revealed. Journalists, too, lapped up insights into how, say, otherwise decent people given arbitrary power over others can become brutal and even sadistic—as the famous Stanford prison experiment purported to find when it asked volunteers to simulate the roles of prisoners and prison guards. And everyone delighted in the cleverly eye-catching ways researchers designed such studies.

Lately, however, the social-science world has become mired in controversy. Researchers themselves have started to note that many famous experiments have been —such as, indeed, the Stanford prison experiment—or simply can’t be replicated. in 2015 reproduced 100 experiments published in three highly influential psychology journals and that just 36 percent yielded results consistent with the original findings.