@article{bcea46e6d7a74ff490d8197d2772323b,
title = "Is the Political Slant of Psychology Research Related to Scientific Replicability?",
abstract = "Social science researchers are predominantly liberal, and critics have argued this representation may reduce the robustness of research by embedding liberal values into the research process. In an adversarial collaboration, we examined whether the political slant of research findings in psychology is associated with lower rates of scientific replicability. We analyzed 194 original psychology articles reporting studies that had been subject to a later replication attempt (N = 1,331,413 participants across replications) by having psychology doctoral students (Study 1) and an online sample of U.S. residents (Study 2) from across the political spectrum code the political slant (liberal vs. conservative) of the original research abstracts. The methods and analyses were preregistered. In both studies, the liberal or conservative slant of the original research was not associated with whether the results were successfully replicated. The results remained consistent regardless of the ideology of the coder. Political slant was unrelated to both subsequent citation patterns and the original study{\textquoteright}s effect size and not consistently related to the original study{\textquoteright}s sample size. However, we found modest evidence that research with greater political slant—whether liberal or conservative—was less replicable, whereas statistical robustness consistently predicted replication success. We discuss the implications for social science, politics, and replicability.",
keywords = "bias, conservative, ideology, liberal, politics, replication",
author = "Reinero, {Diego A.} and Wills, {Julian A.} and Brady, {William J.} and Peter Mende-Siedlecki and Crawford, {Jarret T.} and {Van Bavel}, {Jay J.}",
note = "Funding Information: We thank Jonathan Haidt and members of the New York University Social Identity and Morality Lab for insightful comments on this manuscript (in particular, Philip P{\"a}rnamets for providing helpful statistical counsel). We are grateful to the many researchers who made data from several repositories publicly available, particularly teams from the Open Science Center. In addition, we thank Chris Hartgerink for sharing his data analysis scripts as well as Suraiya Allidina, Anna Balchunas, Matthew Leipzig, and Simone Van Taylor for their assistance in developing study materials and helping build the replication database. We also thank (in alphabetical order) Rhonda Balzarini, Mark Brandt, Robert Calin-Jageman, Evan Carter, Joseph Cesario, Katherine Corker, Katinka Dijkstra, Irena Domachowska, Brent Donnellan, Fredrick “Andy” Eichler, Christopher French, Katie Garrison, Carolyn Gibson, Martin Hagger, Karl Healey, Kevin Holmes, Jay G. Hull, David Johnson, Florian Lange, Richard Lucas, John Lurquin, Florian M{\"u}ller, Sanne Nauts, Leif Nelson, Eva Ranehill, Stuart Ritchie, Brent Roberts, Doug Rohrer, Daniel Simons, Collen Sinclair, Niels van de Ven, Peter Verkoeijen, Ivar Vermeulen, Roberto Weber, Deena Weisberg, Eric Wesselmann, and Iris {\v Z}e{\v z}elj for their help in confirming key analyses. We note that the adversarial collaboration in the present article was such that one “side” was led by J. J. Van Bavel at New York University (including his current and former lab members D. A. Reinero, J. A. Wills, W. J. Brady, and P. Mende-Siedlecki) and the other “side” by J. T. Crawford at The College of New Jersey. Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} The Author(s) 2020.",
year = "2020",
month = nov,
day = "1",
doi = "10.1177/1745691620924463",
language = "English (US)",
volume = "15",
pages = "1310--1328",
journal = "Perspectives on Psychological Science",
issn = "1745-6916",
publisher = "SAGE Publications Inc.",
number = "6",
}