Perhaps Bem himself best summed up many scientists’ attitudes to replication, in an interview some years after his infamous study. ‘I’m all for rigor,’ he said, ‘but I don’t have the patience for it … If you looked at all my past experiments, they were always rhetorical devices. I gathered data to show how my point would be made. I used data as a point of persuasion, and I never really worried about, “Will this replicate or will this not?”’13 Worrying about whether results will replicate or not isn’t optional. It’s the basic spirit of science; a spirit that’s supposed to be made manifest in
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