Michele Gelfand: prediction

Transcript context

…How bad is the replication crisis in social psychology? It relates not so much to your work, but it’s become a big issue. What’s your view? It’s a great question. I’m actually really proud of what psychology’s doing. I think that transparency is really important. Best practices — identifying them is important. I’m really excited about this revolution, we would call it. I would say that cross-cultural psychologists are not too unfamiliar with this kind of replication crisis because for years and years, we know that when you try to replicate something, even in a different state, let alone another country, you are going to be dealing with hundreds of rival hypotheses. Whether it’s different instructions, interpretations of the instructions, or different motivations of the subjects, the interactions with experimenter, they’re all things that can produce null effects, or they can dramatically change your effects. We’re in the business — cross-cultural psychologists — of having problems replicating basic American findings for many, many years. What’s interesting is that what you see in the replication crisis and the recent PNS paper, that the papers that didn’t replicate very well were rated by other scientists as having a lot of contextual factors that might weigh in on them. It’s really important, as we go through the replication crisis, to think about, we’re trying to replicate things. And we have to understand that if they’re very much influenced by the social context, there’s a risk they won’t be replicated. That doesn’t mean that the theory doesn’t matter. The risk — and I’ll talk a couple of seconds about the replication crisis risks — is that people will throw out the theory with the bathwater, whatever the metaphor might be. That we’re in this business now of just seeing, can we replicate this in one other context? As just an example, there was an attempt to replicate some kind of race relations question that was done in LA in Italy. Now that, to me as a cross-cultural psychologist, is silly. But it could also be that if we try to replicate something in Kansas, it might be different. People, I think, need to be collaborative as they seek to replicate, to understand the social context in which the phenomena has been tested and make sure, when things don’t replicate, that there might be a good reason why it hasn’t replicated. As you mentioned before, in your work there’s a notion that fear of outsiders or natural disasters or a sense of threat — it can make a culture tighter. Now, Jonathan Haidt and some other researchers — they’ve talked about how a sense of disgust can make personal moral views, in some way, more conservative, or arguably tighter. Do you think this is ultimately the same phenomenon? Or are they two separate mechanisms here?…

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