In the investigation, a whopping 75% of the social psychology experiments were not replicated, meaning that the originally reported findings vanished when other scientists repeated the experiments. Half of the cognitive psychology studies failed the same test. Details are published in the journal Science.
Even when scientists could replicate original findings, the sizes of the effects they found were on average half as big as reported first time around.
A lot of psychology basically amounts to pseudoscience. Psychologists apply something resembling the scientific method to data that they collect from experiments involving people and write up a paper sounding as confident as they can in some conclusion when ultimately in the vast majority of cases it is complete nonsense.
The replication crisis extends across all scientific domains, not just psychology. Psychology is just the field at the forefront of trying to understand it and make changes to the scientific culture to ensure better practices. ---