Skepticism Required

Guest: Sean Mackinnon, Ph.D, Instructor in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at Dalhousie University  In the scientific method you form a hypothesis, conduct an experiment, analyze data, and draw conclusions.  The ultimate validation of your results comes when someone else is able to replicate your experiment and get the same—or at least a very similar—outcome.  But this last step of validation happens far too rarely for a group of researchers who’ve formed the Reproducibility Project to reproduce published studies and see if they get the same results.