We might try to tell ourselves that there’s something unique about psychology as a discipline that caused its replication crisis. Psychologists have the unenviable job of trying to understand highly variable and highly complicated human beings, with all their different personalities and backgrounds and experiences and moods and quirks. The things they study, like thought, emotion, attention, ability, and perception, are usually intangible – difficult, if not impossible, to pin down in a lab experiment – and in social psychology, they have to study how all those complicated humans interact with
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