Here is an interesting excerpt. > “Psychology Does Not Yield Repeatable Results” How replicable (repeatable) are the results of psychology compared with those

Here is an interesting excerpt. > “Psychology Does Not Yield Repeatable Results” How replicable (repeatable) are the results of psychology compared with those of the hard sciences? Larry Hedges (1987) decided to find out. He compared the replicability of findings in particle physics, ostensibly one of the most rigorous domains of physics, with those of several areas in psychology, including the effect of teacher expectations on students’ IQ scores, gender differences in verbal and spatial ability, the effects of desegregation on educational achieve- ment, and the validity of student course evaluations. Using various statistical metrics of consistency, Hedges found that the results of particle physics studies aimed at estimating the mass or lifetime of stable subatomic particles (e.g., the muon) were in general no more consistent that those of psychology. Hedges’s findings suggest that the claim that psychology’s results are far less dependable than those of physics are not supported by data. > Still, we should not overstate the implications of Hedges’s (1987) findings. As Hedges acknowledged, he did not sample randomly within either physics or psychol- ogy, so his results may be unrepresentative of the domains within these broad fields. Nevertheless, Hedges observed that the results of studies in several other domains of physics, including the estimation of chemical and thermo- dynamic constants, appear to be about equally consistent (or inconsistent, depending on whether one chooses to view the glass as half full or half empty) as those within many domains of psychology.