Negative Results

“Replicability of findings is at the heart of any empirical science” (Asendorpf, Conner, De Fruyt, et al., 2013, p. 108) The idea that scientific results should be reliably demonstrable under controlled circumstances has a special status in science. In contrast to our high expectations for replicability, unfortunately, recent reports suggest that only about 36% (Open Science Collaboration, 2015) to 62% (Camerer, Dreber, Holzmeister, et al.

[This blog is a summary of a longer treatment of the subject that was published in Frontiers in Psychology in June 2017. To read that article, click here.] Physicists have asked “why is there something rather than nothing?” They have theorized that it had to do with the formation of an asymmetry between matter and antimatter in the fractions of milliseconds after the Big Bang.

It is well known that there is a bias towards publication of statistically significant results. In fact, we have known this for at least 25 years since the publication of De Long and Lang (JPE 1992): “Economics articles are sprinkled with very low t-statistics – marginal significance levels very close to one – on nuisance coefficients.