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Astral Codex Ten ·For the curious

Psychology Research is Mostly Fine

by Scott Alexander

Published 2026-07-28 11:05:46+00:00

If a handful of famous experiments fail, does that mean an entire science is broken?

0:00 / 7:43 · Narrator Charon

Context

For years, critics have used the replication crisis as a club to beat the field of psychology, writing it off as a broken discipline. But writing in Astral Codex Ten on 28 July 2026, the author notes that this dismissal ignores what psychologists actually do all day. The math simply does not add up between the tiny fraction of social experiments that fell apart and the thousands of researchers quietly measuring brain chemistry or treating addiction. The gap raises a simple question: why did a few flashy mistakes manage to sink an entire science?

Show notes

An argument that the replication crisis in psychology is much smaller than the public believes. By breaking down the contents of a standard introductory textbook, the author shows that replication failures are mostly confined to a narrow slice of social psychology. The rest of the field, from clinical practice to cognitive research, continues to produce reliable science.

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