Reckoning With Our Crisis: An Agenda for the Field of Social and Personality Psychology.

The replication crisis and credibility revolution in the 2010s brought a wave of doubts about the credibility of social and personality psychology. We argue that as a field, we must reckon with the concerns brought to light during this critical decade. How the field responds to this crisis will reveal our commitment to self-correction. If we do not take the steps necessary to address our problems and simply declare the crisis to be over or the problems to be fixed without evidence, we risk further undermining our credibility. To fully reckon with this crisis, we must empirically assess the state of the field to take stock of how credible our science actually is and whether it is improving. We propose an agenda for metascientific research, and we review approaches to empirically evaluate and track where we are as a field (e.g., analyzing the published literature, surveying researchers). We describe one such project (Surveying the Past and Present State of Published Studies in Social and Personality Psychology) underway in our research group. Empirical evidence about the state of our field is necessary if we are to take self-correction seriously and if we hope to avert future crises.

The crisis from above: Gatekeepers need better standards.

Improvements to the validity of psychological science depend upon more than the actions of individual researchers. Editors, journals, and publishers wield considerable power in shaping the incentives that have ushered in the generalizability crisis. These gatekeepers must raise their standards to ensure authors' claims are supported by evidence. Unless gatekeepers change, changes made by individual scientists will not be sustainable.

Initial evidence of research quality of registered reports compared with the standard publishing model.

In registered reports (RRs), initial peer review and in-principle acceptance occur before knowing the research outcomes. This combats publication bias and distinguishes planned from unplanned research. How RRs could improve the credibility of research findings is straightforward, but there is little empirical evidence. Also, there could be unintended costs such as reducing novelty. Here, 353 researchers peer reviewed a pair of papers from 29 published RRs from psychology and neuroscience and 57 non-RR comparison papers. RRs numerically outperformed comparison papers on all 19 criteria (mean difference 0.46, scale range -4 to +4) with effects ranging from RRs being statistically indistinguishable from comparison papers in novelty (0.13, 95% credible interval [-0.24, 0.49]) and creativity (0.22, [-0.14, 0.58]) to sizeable improvements in rigour of methodology (0.99, [0.62, 1.35]) and analysis (0.97, [0.60, 1.34]) and overall paper quality (0.66, [0.30, 1.02]). RRs could improve research quality while reducing publication bias and ultimately improve the credibility of the published literature.