Thor Grünbaum and Frederik Andersen
Affiliation: University of Copenhagen
Category: Philosophy
Keywords: Replication, Cognitive psychology, Experiments, Psychological theories, Formal modelling, Frequentism, Bayesianism
Date: Wednesday 3rd of September
Time: 17:30
Location: GSSR Plenary Hall (268)
View the full session: Methodology
Experiments in psychology fail to replicate too often. In various branches of psychology published experimental results are overturned by later studies trying to replicate them. This paper discusses two prominent accounts explaining and responding to the replication crisis in psychological science: An objectivist frequentist account and a subjectivist Bayesian account. Common to these accounts is their emphasis on the importance of base rates in understanding and remedying the crisis. Our aim is to charge a middle way between an objectivist frequentist conception and a subjectivist Bayesian conception of the base rate problem of true hypotheses. On the one hand, the frequentist conception ends up with requirements that current experimental psychology will be unable to satisfy. On the other hand, the subjectivist Bayesian conception ends up providing estimates of the base rate that no longer track the real base rate of true hypotheses in the fields of experimental psychology. In this paper, we provide a road map of the frequentist and Bayesian proposals and argue that both of them lead to an apparent impasse. We then propose a way out of this dilemma. The basic idea is that both strong formal theorizing (in the form of mathematizable computational theories) and rigorous experimental practice matter.