Many famous studies of human behavior cannot be reproduced. Even so, they revealed aspects of our inner lives that feel true.
In recent months, researchers and some journalists have strung cables around the necks of at least three monuments of the modern psychological canon:
The famous Stanford Prison Experiment, which found that people playacting as guards quickly exhibited uncharacteristic cruelty.
The landmark marshmallow test, which found that young children who could delay gratification showed greater educational achievement years later than those who could not.
And the lesser known but influential concept of ego depletion — the idea that willpower is like a muscle that can be built up but also tires.
The assaults on these studies aren’t all new. Each is a story in its own right, involving debates over methodology and statistical bias that have surfaced before in some form.
But since 2011, the psychology field has been giving itself an intensive background check, redoing more than 100 well-known studies. Often the original results cannot be reproduced, and the entire contentious process has been colored, inevitably, by generational change and charges of patriarchy.
“This is a phase of cleaning house and we’re finding that many things aren’t as robust as we thought,” said Brian Nosek, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, who has led the replication drive. “This is a reformation moment — to say let’s self-correct, and build on knowledge that we know is solid.”