Several aspects of the proposal, which aims to expand open access, require serious discussion and, in some cases, a rethink.
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The Reproducibility Project: Psychology (RP:P) attempted to replicate 100 cognitive and social-personality psychology studies (1). Van Bavel et al. (2) report an association (r = −0.23, P = 0.024) between a study’s rated “contextual dependence” and whether the study was successfully replicated by the RP:P. However, this association is entirely the result of an omitted third variable: whether the study was in cognitive or social-personality psychology. Within each subdiscipline there is no relationship between context dependence and replicability: r = −0.08, P = 0.54 for social-personality psychology; r = −0.04, P = 0.79 for cognitive psychology (point-biserial correlations).
The Third-Variable Problem
The RP:P coded studies as cognitive (n = 43) or social-personality (n = 57) psychology; the former were …
↵1Email: yoel.inbar{at}utoronto.ca.
Contextual dependence and replicability
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