A little preliminary of the sort of thing you’re going to see in HARDCODED when it comes out in April
64% Of Psychology Turned Out To Be Garbage
The warning signs had been there for decades. People just weren’t listening.
In 1962, Paul Meehl was already arguing that psychology’s statistical methods were fundamentally flawed—that the field was “confirming” theories the way a horoscope confirms your personality. He spent twenty years yelling about this. Nobody cared. He died in 2003, still yelling.
In 2005—a full decade before anyone ran the big replication study—John Ioannidis published what might be the most important paper in modern science: “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.” The title kind of says it. He used mathematical modeling to demonstrate that the way studies were designed, funded, and published made false positives not just likely but inevitable. The paper has been cited over 12,000 times. The field nodded, called it “provocative,” and kept publishing the same way.
Then in 2015, someone finally checked the homework.
A group called the Open Science Collaboration tried to replicate 100 published psychology studies. These weren’t fringe findings. These were peer-reviewed, statistically significant results from respected journals. The stuff textbooks are made of.
Thirty-six percent replicated.
Nearly two-thirds of published findings—the research that shaped TED Talks and bestsellers and Jennifer’s Saturday brunches—couldn’t be reproduced when someone else tried.
Meehl and Ioannidis had called it. The field that studies human behavior discovered that most of what it “knew” about human behavior might be wrong.
As bad as it is in the field of psychology, it’s even worse in a number of other scientific fields. And the institutional incentives are such that it can only continue to get worse in all of them.