So this was an interesting post for me, because I have a graduate degree in social psychology, and quit after three years as a professor in part because I had come to believe that the research paradigm I was trained in (laboratory studies of group decision making, mostly using undergrads) was meaningless. So I am all for the critiquing! And yet... I don't want people to lose sight of the fact that *something* happened in this study. Something happened, and it was described in enough detail that various people on this post have been able to suggest intriguing alternative hypotheses that future researchers could test. This is still science! It's science that's probably taking the scenic route to usable insights, instead of heading directly there, but this study wasn't pointless.

I'm glad I got out of the field when I did. I support the efforts to replicate classic studies, but from what I've heard (in media reports, because I've lost touch with everyone who's still working in the area) a lot of it has been in a spirit of drama, wank, and back-biting, rather than a spirit of inquiry.

Because here's the thing: high-impact social psychology studies have always required certain skills in the researchers. You're trying to capture a complex human phenomenon and model it in a brief, safe time and space. That modeling is possible *if* you can get the participants to buy into it, and I don't know if anyone ever succeeded in quantifying or describing the contextual qualities that create that buy-in. Ugh, it's getting late and I'm not sure I know where I'm going with this anyway... I think maybe my point is that a failure to replicate doesn't necessarily mean that the original study was just a random fluke - it can just as likely mean that there were other social forces at work in the original study that were not specified in a way that makes them easily replicable... but something still happened that is worth understanding and pursuing, albeit maybe in a different direction.