Jonathan Haidt: belief

Transcript context

…There is a big debate lately about a replication crisis or supposed replication crisis in many fields, but a lot of it’s been social psychology. What’s your view on that debate? I have good friends on both sides. They all make incredibly good points. I think Brian Nosek, who’s been leading the charge on the problems in psychology, is largely right. That our methods have been sloppy, which has allowed us to engage in practices where we’re just more likely than we should be to get a significant result. And then of course, that’s more likely to get published. Given that we find the same problem in cancer research and biomedical research — in almost every field where it’s been looked at — I think that the replication crisis is very real. It should be a top priority for science. A lot of my work is on how we are not fully rational creatures. We are deeply emotional and tribal creatures. If you have this idealized view of researchers and our null hypothesis significant testing is based on idealized view of researchers who are basically testing samples honestly. “Well, this could only happen 1 in 20 times by chance,” but we’re not those creatures. We want certain outcomes to happen. We make certain choices unconsciously. We all have to up our game. I don’t think there’s anything special about social psychology. It’s no worse than other fields. But we have been the leaders at actually addressing it, and saying, “Why are we not able to replicate each other’s work so much?” I actually am impressed that the young generation has really embraced this and simply committing to making your data available — if you know that other people are going to get access to your SPSS file, or whatever, your data file, and they’re going to be looking it over, boy, you’re going to be a lot more careful. I think just by raising the crisis, raising the alarm last year, the quality of our work is going to go substantially up. I’m really excited by this. What’s the best replacement for religion in modern, secular society?…

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