Discover Magazine‘s Neuroskeptic blog reports on another failure on the front of psychology studies:
There have been many published studies of romantic priming (43 experiments across 15 papers, according to Shanks et al.) and the vast majority have found statistically significant effects. The effect would appear to be reproducible! But in the new paper, Shanks et al. report that they tried to replicate these effects in eight experiments, with a total of over 1600 participants, and they came up with nothing. Romantic priming had no effect.
Apparently the urge to find something has led to optimistic evaluation of the results:
Shanks et al. say that this is evidence of the existence of “either p-hacking in previously published studies or selective publication of results (or both).” These two forms of bias go hand in hand, so the answer is probably both. Publication bias is the tendency of scientists (including peer reviewers and editors) to prefer positive results over negative ones. P-hacking is a process by which scientists can maximize their chances of finding positive results.
