A new study co-authored by Cognitive and Information Sciences Professor Paul Smaldino focuses on the impact of replication studies on psychologists' beliefs. The researchers found that psychologists did update their beliefs in accord with new evidence, and that they were also accurate in predicting the extent to which their beliefs would change in light of new evidence. Importantly, the degree to which psychologists updated their beliefs was not affected by whether or not the results turned out differently than they expected. These results provide hope that behavioral scientists may be less influenced by motivated reasoning than sometimes feared, and more able to rely rationally on an accumulated body of evidence.
The study was published in Nature Human Behaviour.
