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Is the replication crisis worst in psychology or medicine?

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Summary

The replication crisis is highly visible in psychology because systematic, large-scale replication efforts have been undertaken there first. However, selective audits and fraud scandals in biomedicine suggest that parts of medicine—especially pre-clinical research on disease mechanisms and drug targets—may have equal or even lower reproducibility. The present evidence therefore does not allow a simple ranking; psychology supplies the best quantitative data, while medicine supplies the most severe downstream consequences when findings fail.

Comparison of Psychology vs. Medicine

Psychology

  • The Open Science Collaboration attempted to replicate 100 prominent studies and reproduced the original effect in only 36–47 % of cases, depending on the definition of “success” [1].
  • Commentators such as the Unsafe Science newsletter argue that subsequent meta-analyses imply roughly 75 % of headline psychological findings are likely false or inflated [2].
  • Topic-specific reviews (e.g., stereotype threat) show that even famous, policy-relevant phenomena shrink or vanish under improved methods [4].

Medicine

  • In biomedicine, the best-known systematic audit was a private effort by Amgen scientists: only 6 of 53 “landmark” pre-clinical cancer studies could be confirmed (≈11 % replication) [8].
  • Earlier, Ioannidis famously modelled why “most published research findings are false,” focusing on clinical epidemiology [7].
  • A 2023 Nature news feature reports that replication projects in cancer biology, Alzheimer’s disease and other pre-clinical areas regularly fail, although the absolute number of formal replication attempts is still small [6].
  • Fraud scandals—most recently the alleged manipulation of key Alzheimer’s images discussed in the New York Times—underscore how a single bad dataset can steer an entire therapeutic field for years [3].

Areas of Agreement and Disagreement among Authors

Agreement

  • All cited authors concede that low statistical power, publication bias and flexibility in analysis plague both domains [1][2][6][7].
  • Most agree that transparency reforms—preregistration, open data, registered reports—offer remedies.

Disagreement

  • Magnitude: Inzlicht sees psychology gradually improving and warns that “replication failure does not equal fraud” [4], whereas Unsafe Science claims that the field remains “75 % wrong” [2].
  • Relative severity: Ioannidis and Begley view biomedicine as worse because false findings can kill, not merely misinform [7][8], while psychologists emphasize their uniquely public reckoning [1][4].

Public Discourse and Consequences

Media outlets such as Vox highlight the human cost when biomedical errors propagate to clinical practice or drug development, estimating “tens of thousands” of preventable deaths worldwide each year [5]. Policy discussions in the U.S. and U.K. now weigh criminal penalties for certain types of scientific fraud [5]. In contrast, psychology’s crisis has mainly affected academic incentives and credibility, spurring reforms like the Psychological Science Accelerator.

Conclusion

Quantitatively, psychology supplies the clearest replication statistics, showing success rates around 40 %. Qualitatively, medicine’s failures—though harder to measure—carry higher societal stakes and may exhibit even lower reproducibility in specific subfields. Therefore, the “worst” crisis depends on whether one emphasizes measured frequency (psychology) or potential harm and anecdotal evidence of lower rates (medicine).

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Sources

  1. Open Science Collaboration. “Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science.” Science (2015). https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26315443/
  2. Unsafe Science. “~75 % of Psychology Claims Are False.” Substack (2024). https://unsafescience.substack.com/p/75-of-psychology-claims-are-false
  3. The New York Times. “The Long Shadow of Fraud in Alzheimer’s Research.” Opinion (2025). https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/24/opinion/alzheimers-fraud-cure.html
  4. Inzlicht, M. “Revisiting Stereotype Threat: A Reckoning for Social Psychology.” Pre-print (2024). https://www.thewikle.com/resources/RevisitingStereotypeThreat-byMichaelInzlicht.pdf
  5. Vox. “The Staggering Death Toll of Scientific Lies.” (2024). https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/368350/scientific-research-fraud-crime-jail-time
  6. Nature. “Why some experiments don’t replicate — and what to do about it.” d41586-023-02299-w (2023). https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02299-w
  7. Ioannidis, J.P.A. “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.” PLoS Medicine (2005). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124
  8. Begley, C.G. & Ellis, L.M. “Drug development: Raise standards for preclinical cancer research.” Nature (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/483531a

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