Replication and theory, theory and replication

The psychological sciences are described as being in crisis. The source of this crisis is hotly debated, but it is most often described as a crisis of replication. Culture of psychological science (eg Nosek & Bar-Anan, 2012), statistical practice (eg Benjamin et al, 2018), effects-centric thinking (Broers, 2021) and flexible theory (Szollosi & Donkin, 2021) have all been implicated. That there is a crisis - and that it, in some sense, is a crisis of (un)replicability - is accepted by most commentators. The same issues were faced by chemists as it developed from alchemy. Although highly replicable now, chemistry was not – and could not be – as reliable before theory was developed that defined experimental success (Boyle, 1668). Parts of psychological science are in a similar situation.