Professional incentive systems shaped by a systemic preference for statistical significance play a key role in psychologys replication crisis. Though scientific progress hinges upon the accumulation and dissemination of new knowledge, those involved in the publication process have mistakenly equated new and important findings with statistically significant results. As a result, journals are more likely to publish significant findings over null results. However, in academias highly competitive publish or perish culture, career success for researchers is defined by their publication output and impact. Given the well-documented existence of publication bias, it therefore stands that a preference for positive findings within journals will motivate the pursuit of significant results among researchers. As such, it is argued that external pressures to produce significant findings will shape how researchers design, analyse, and report studies such that positive results are more likely to arise. As significant findings become more common, both true and false positives will become increasingly prevalent in published bodies of literature, resulting in low replicability. Looking more broadly, institutional incentives also motivate researchers to overstate research outcomes and seek theory-supportive data. These positivist research practices are enabled by the methodological flexibility associated with psychology and its indirect measures of intangible constructs, which can inflate the false discovery rate in research. When considered in combination, it becomes clear that the incentive systems that unintentionally reward positivist practices have allowed for the continued survival of dud theories, much to the detriment of research integrity and credibility. Thus, the existence of external motivations that biases research output has increased the share of false positives in published literature, acting as
one of the central factors behind the replication crisis in psychology.
Though failures to replicate published findings have heightened scepticism around the credibility and integrity of psychological research, critics often fail to account for the widespread prevalence of low replicability in other academic disciplines. The results of recent efforts by the Open Science Collaboration (205) to replicate 00 results from top-tier psychology journals has created a sense of panic around the validity of published empirical findings. In particular, the study revealed that only 36% of the findings yielded significant results again, with replication effect sizes being found to be only around half the size of what was originally reported (Open Science Collaboration, 205). From this, many concluded that the low rates of successful replications were indicative of a concerningly high prevalence of false positives and overstated effect sizes in existing literature (Ioannides, 2005; Zwan, Etz, Lucas, & Donnellan, 207). Though such low reproducibility has been used as an indictment of psychology as a scientific discipline, critics of the field have neglected to consider how failures to replicate empirical findings occur in many other areas of academic research, including cancer research (Begley & Ellis, 202), strategic management (Bergh, Sharp, Aguinis, & Li, 207), and economics (Camerer et al. 206). Though mainly prevalent in the domains of social and biomedical sciences, some have speculated that disciplines that have not struggled with failures to replicate have simply not yet systematically examined the issue (Zwan, Etz, Lucas, & Donnellan, 207). Ergo, with the interdisciplinary and widespread nature of low replicability, it stands to suggest that the root cause of failures to replicate is endemic across multiple spheres of academic research the institutional systems that support and facilitate research.