The replication crisis is a big deal. But it’s a problem in lots of scientific fields. Why is so much of the discussion about psychology research?
Why not economics, which is more controversial and gets more space in the news media? Or medicine, which has higher stakes and a regular flow of well-publicized scandals?
Here are some relevant factors that I see, within the field of psychology:
1. Sophistication: Psychology’s discourse on validity, reliability, and latent constructs is much more sophisticated than the usual treatment of measurement in statistics, economics, biology, etc. So you see Paul Meehl raising serious questions as early as the 1960s, at a time in which min other fields we were just getting naive happy talk about how all problems would be solved with randomized experiments.
