Developing Good Replication Practices
In my last post, I described a (mostly) successful replication by
Steegen et al. of the ”crowd-within
effect.” The authors of that replication effort felt that it would be nice
to mention all the good replication research practices that they had implemented...

Who’s Gonna Lay Down the Law in Psytown?
These are troubled times in our little frontier town called
Psytown. The priest keeps telling us that deep down we’re all p-hackers and
that we must atone for our sins. If you go out on the streets, you face arrest by any number
of unregulated police forces...

Trying to Understand both Sides of the Replication Discussion
I missed most of the recent discussion on replication
because I’m on vacation. However, the weather’s not very inviting this morning
in southern Spain, so I thought I’d try to catch up a bit on the fracas, and
try to see where both sides are coming from. My...

The Undead Findings are Among Us
A few months ago, I was asked to review a manuscript on
social-behavioral priming. There were many things to be surprised about in this
manuscript, not the least of which was that it cited several papers by Diederik
Stapel. These papers had already been ret...

New paper on language and embodiment.

Is There Really a Crowd Within?
In 1907 Francis Galton (two years prior to becoming “Sir”) published
a paper in Nature titled “Vox populi” (voice
of the people). With the rise of democracy in the (Western) world, he wondered
how much trust people could put in public judgments. How wise is...

My Take on Replication
There are quite a few comments on my previous post already,
both on this blog and elsewhere. That post was my attempt to make sense of the
discussion that all of a sudden dominated my Twitter feed (I’d been offline for
several days). Emotions were runing hi...

Are we Intuitively Cooperative (or are we Moving the Goalposts)?
Are we an intuitively cooperative species? A study that was published a few years ago in Nature suggests that indeed our initial inclination is to cooperate with others. We
are only selfish if we are allowed to reflect. How did the researchers obtain these ...

Why do We Make Gestures (Even when No One Can See Them)?
The gesture doesn't work all the time Why do we gesture? An obvious answer is that we
gesture to communicate. After having just taken down his opponent in a two-legged flying tackle, the soccer
player puts on his most innocent face while making a perfect sp...

Replicating Down vs. Replicating Up
More and more people are involved in replication research.
This is a good thing. Why conduct replication experiments? A major motivation for
recent replication attempts appears to have been because there are serious doubts
about certain findings. On that vi...

Back to the Future
One of my last actions as Editor-in-Chief of Acta Psychologica was to accept a manuscript for publication that is very timely given the current “crisis of confidence” in
psychology. One of the paper's key points is that it is crucial to distinguish
between ...