Adams State participation in global study validation effort

The psychology department at Adams State University, including staff and students, has joined in a historic project to reproduce previous studies for validation by rendering the same or different results.

The international collaboration, called Reproducibility Project Psychology, is intended to explore results that have been published as "profound discoveries." 

“Results only have validity if they can be replicated,” Kim Kelso, chair of the psychology department, said. “That’s what we tell students, but we don’t walk the talk.”

Reproducibility means the results recur when the same data are analyzed again or when new data are collected using the same methods. Open Science Framework launched the project to initiate replication of 100 studies published in prominent psychology journals to find that fewer than half of them produced the same findings as the original studies.

Two projects were worked on at Adams State. "Detecting the Snake in the Grass: Attention to Fear-Relevant Stimuli by Adults and Young Children" was headed up by R. Nate Pipitone, assistant professor of psychology and Dr. Leslie Alvarez. They produced similar results to the initial study.

"The Space Between Us: Stereotype, Threat and Distance in Interracial Contexts," led by Kelso, produced reasonably similar results but also showed a need for better descriptions of methodology, as there were discrepancies.