23_03_2018_NOTICIA_EyP_gonzalo-arrondo

Gonzalo Arrondo Ostiz, researcher of the School of Education and Psychology and member researcher of group Mente-Cerebro en el Institute for Culture and Society (ICS at the University of Navarra gave last March 21 a session for teachers under the degree scroll "2011-2018: The `reproducibility crisis' or how Psychology has changed the way of understanding experimental sciences".

Arrondo focused on reproducibility in research, which means that an experiment should have similar or the same results if conducted at two different times.

Since 2011, discussion has emerged in the public sphere about the extent to which experiments are reproducible as a result of the fact that famous experiments have been found not to be reproducible. During the session, some of the mechanisms that may be leading to experiments not being reproducible were explained. These include fraud (there have been specific cases of researchers inventing their data or fabricating research that had never been carried out) but also institutional pressures to publish or the lack of statistical knowledge . Some of the solutions that have been proposed to the problem were also discussed, among which Arrondo emphasized the internship of publicly pre-registering the methods of a research so that they are not improvised or changed once they have already begun.

The concept of reproducibility first appeared in the empirical sciences and in the field of medicine, but perhaps where it has been most discussed is in the field of psychology. However, it is applicable to anyone who is doing research.