Building a Cumulative Psychological Science

What is it about?

The past decade has seen much debate and controversy over the replication crisis: the failure to reproduce many of psychology’s most prominent findings. The editors of this special issue asked researchers and thought leaders in different subdisciplines of psychology to reflect on where we stand on the replication crisis after a decade or more of discussion and to suggest how to build a cumulative science. The articles comment on topics related to elements of research seen as causes for and responses to the crisis, including theory, measurement, preregistration, data analysis, questionable research practices, publication policies, research collaborations, and quantitative literature reviews.

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Why is it important?

Canadian psychology journals have not focused much attention on the crisis. The irony is that two articles published in Canadian Psychology / Psychologie canadienne predicted the current crisis. In 1991, Adair speculated that in 20 years the field would be in a crisis arising from “piles of issues, without many being settled.” Moreover, Gendreau in 2001 anticipated some of the responses to the current crisis: “The replacement of significance testing with point estimates and confidence intervals, the use of practical effect size statistics, the establishment of data repositories, and a renewed focus on replication.” This special issue seeks to address the attention gap in both the field and the journal by featuring prominent researchers from Canada and the U.S. It provides an integrative view of the crisis across the subfields of psychology from research conception to publication by many prominent researchers and advocates of better science.