Study Reveals That a Lot of Psychology Research Really Is Just ‘Psycho-Babble’

Psychlogy-GettyPsychology has long been the butt of jokes about its deep insight into the human mind – especially from the “hard” sciences such as physics – and now a study has revealed that much of its published research really is psycho-babble.

More than half of the findings from 100 different studies published in leading, peer-reviewed psychology journals cannot be reproduced by other researchers who followed the same methodological protocol.

A study by more than 270 researchers from around the world has found that just 39 per cent of the claims made in psychology papers published in three prominent journals could be reproduced unambiguously – and even then they were found to be less significant statistically than the original findings.

The non-reproducible research includes studies into what factors influence men’s and women’s choice of romantic partners, whether peoples’ ability to identify an object is slowed down if it is wrongly labelled, and whether people show any racial bias when asked to identify different kinds of weapons.

The researchers who carried out the work, published in the journal Science, said that reproducibility is the essence of the scientific method and more must be done to ensure that what is published can be replicated by other researchers. (Read more from “Study Reveals That a Lot of Psychology Research Really Is Just ‘Psycho-Babble'” HERE)

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