Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth

by Stuart Ritchie

studies we saw above).32 In general, though, the effect on psychology has been devastating. This wasn’t just a case of fluffy, flashy research like priming and power posing being debunked: a great deal of far more ‘serious’ psychological research (like the Stanford Prison Experiment, and much else besides) was also thrown into doubt. And neither was it a matter of digging up some irrelevant antiques and performatively showing that they were bad – like when Pope Stephen VI, in the year 897, exhumed the corpse of one of his predecessors, Pope Formosus, and put it on trial (it was found guilty). The studies that failed to replicate continued to be routinely cited both by scientists and other writers: entire lines of research, and bestselling popular books, were being built on their foundation. ‘Crisis’ seems to be an apt description.