Replication Crisis: Can We Trust The Scientific Method Anymore?

The scientific method has an unusual logic. You can never prove that your phone is connected to the internet. But you can reject, with 95% chance, that it is disconnected. This has long enabled researchers in natural medical or human sciences to try their own rejection tests—or falsification tests.

But this has not led to higher reliability. Because another foundation of the scientific method has recently faced a major crisis. Its replicability is now in question, which is simply the possibility of repeating an experiment in different times and spaces.

It seems like many replicated experiments have not consistently produced similar results. It has started from psychology, but has quickly begun worrying other scholars in other disciplines in natural and social sciences.

That sparked a wake up call in 2015 and incited a group of psychologists to apply the scientific method to a wide range of research and try to replicate them. To their own shock, only 40% of them were replicable. Other studies have not found better results.

The BBC Radio Four Analysis podcast looks into the reasons (including the competitive market of research that encourages sensational rather than credible results) and explores the potential solutions to the replication crisis in a series of interviews with talks to notable scientists such as Brian Nosek, Simine Vaziri, Stephen Reicher, and Susan Fiske.