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The ability to recreate a study and produce the same result is a cornerstone of research credibility. So how is credibility impacted if half of a discipline’s research findings cannot be replicated? That is the question facing the social and behavioral sciences following the publication of a landmark new study in Nature, which found researchers could only successfully replicate the results of published studies about half the time. In the largest-ever effort of its kind, Constructor University researchers joined more than 800 social scientists from around the world to assess nearly 4,000 claims from several hundred published studies for reproducibility, replicability and robustness.
The initiative, called SCORE (Systematizing Confidence in Open Research and Evidence), began in 2019 and included three separate studies aimed at assessing the credibility of social science research projects published between 2009 and 2018. The results of all three studies were published this month in Nature, generating a flurry of discussion, including editorial responses from both Nature and Science and coverage in the New York Times.
Constructor University Associate Professor of Psychology Dr. Ulrich Kühnen is a contributing author to the replicability study, and is optimistic that the project will represent a net positive for the field, despite the attention-grabbing headlines.
“This should not be seen as fundamentally criticizing the social sciences as an unreliable field of inquiry, that would be just plain wrong,” he said. “It’s a call for further research that identifies the boundary conditions of previous findings and hopefully helps us understand the underlying processes more thoroughly.”
These boundary conditions include specific circumstances, such as cultural context, time period, population characteristics and methodological approaches that impact outcomes and simultaneously help researchers understand when and where a finding will reasonably hold true. Prof. Kühnen uses the simple illustration of a study on mood, where a piece of media like a funny video might be used to evoke a certain emotional response in participants. This same exercise replicated 15 years later could reasonably evoke an entirely different response if the video is no longer seen as funny by present standards.
“The most important implication is that we learn to look at replications, and failed replications, to study the boundary conditions that tell us when a finding replicates and when it does not. This is how we advance our field. When we discover something that we believed was true isn't necessarily true, that should not be seen as a crisis. We are researchers, and of course we are always open to changing our minds if better evidence comes in.”
The Constructor contribution
Prof. Kühnen joined the SCORE project in 2019 alongside then-PhD fellows Lusine Grigoryan, Vladimir Ponizovskiy and Cristina Greculescu from the Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences (BIGSSS)—a joint venture of Constructor University and the University of Bremen. Seeing an opportunity to leverage the interdisciplinary expertise, resources and local German presence of BIGSSS, the group answered a call to contribute to SCORE by replicating a 2010 study on workplace stress and well-being among German kindergarten teachers.
“It is no coincidence that our fellows had the sensitivity to identify such a multidisciplinary project as SCORE," said Prof. Kühnen. “Constructor University has been highly committed to interdisciplinarity and collaboration from the very beginning. This was the driving force that materialized into BIGSSS, a fundamentally interdisciplinary collaboration with our partners at the University of Bremen contributing to psychology, sociology and political science.”
Ultimately, the BIGSSS study was among those that did not successfully replicate. However, Dr. Greculescu, now with the University of Münster, noted that the true success was the opportunity to contribute to such a large-scale collaborative effort like SCORE.
“It shows the proactive spirit that we had at the time, as well as our willingness and ability to contribute to such a significant project,” said Dr. Greculescu. “I very much see it as an institutional success for BIGSSS. As a private-public university collaboration, it is very unique in Germany, yet this project showcased its strengths as a place where researchers in different fields can come together to contribute to major, international projects.”
A win for open science
Dr. Greculescu also underscored the true value of SCORE in helping to promote more rigorous, transparent research practices across all scientific disciplines. "This is a self-critical moment for social and behavioral sciences in general, but in a good way," she said. “It's paving the road toward more integrity and more openness in the scientific endeavor.”
Alongside its primary research objectives, promoting greater transparency and openness in research was a key aspect of SCORE. All of the project’s research datasets, evidence and code have been made openly available for transparency and reuse through its open-access database.
"The SCORE database lays an unprecedented empirical foundation for systematically investigating boundary conditions that lead to either replication or a lack of replication," Dr. Greculescu noted. "This openly accessible data from the replicability, reproducibility and robustness studies is of unparalleled scale and value."
Dr. Greculescu also emphasized the broader significance and ‘ripple effect’ of the work: "The fact that these papers were published in a major, prestigious science journal like Nature shows that there is a lot of focus now being placed on doing science the right way. There is a very big push for open science: making your datasets publicly available, pre-registering your hypotheses. This is a positive signal that this work matters, that doing science with integrity matters."
Ulrich Kühnen, Associate Professor of Psychology, Constructor University
https://constructor.university/faculty-member/ulrich-kuhnen
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-10078-y
https://www.cos.io/score - SCORE project website
Prof. Dr. Ulrich Kühnen, Associate Professor of Psychology, Constructor University
Quelle: Constructor University
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