To the Editor:
Jacob Mikanowski’s recent essay in The Chronicle Review, “How a Scientific Consensus Collapsed” (February 20), presents social psychology as experiencing catastrophic failure. While the field has faced methodological challenges, Mikanowski’s portrayal significantly misrepresents both these challenges and the current state of the discipline.
The “replication crisis” represents not a field in ruins but science functioning as it should. When methodological concerns emerged about certain findings, social psychologists themselves led efforts to address these issues through initiatives like the adoption of open science practices, the Many Labs projects, the Psychological Science Accelerator, and validity-enforcing requirements by journals that publish the work. This self-correction, while sometimes painful, demonstrates scientific integrity rather than collapse. One of the greatest strengths of science is precisely this capacity for self-correction. The field’s response to replication challenges exemplifies this process working effectively, not failing.
Mikanowski’s critique fails to acknowledge that all scientific fields periodically face challenges regarding methodology, replication, and overextended claims. The “replication crisis” is neither unique to social psychology nor evidence of its particular failings. In medicine, Ioannidis’s 2005 paper raised similar concerns about reliability across biomedical research. Physics has its “five-sigma” standard precisely because preliminary results so often disappear upon closer examination. What distinguishes good science is not the absence of such problems but how the field responds to them.
Committing an all-or-nothing fallacy, Mikanowski focuses on a handful of controversial findings while ignoring the vast body of social psychological research that has replicated consistently. The vast majority of core social psychological findings have shown considerable replicability — from research on cognitive dissonance to social facilitation effects, from studies of conformity to work on attitude formation, from research on stereotyping to studies of social cognition.
Particularly troubling is Mikanowski’s mischaracterization of Nisbett and Wilson’s seminal 1977 paper. In reality, they integrated evidence from multiple research traditions and reported five separate studies demonstrating consistent patterns — people often lack access to the full set of influence factors on their judgments and behaviors. This is a finding that is not hard to evidence and is well-established across numerous studies in cognitive science, neuroscience, and clinical psychology.
In response to methodological challenges, social psychology has transformed itself over the past 15 years. Such transformations include fundamental changes to how research is conducted, reported, and evaluated. The field now emphasizes transparency through preregistration, adequately powered studies, open science practices, multi-site collaborations, and methodological innovation. Nosek and colleagues (2022) document considerable evidence that research practices are changing, with widespread adoption of transparency tools, growing emphasis on replication, and institutional changes in journal policies.
By cherry-picking controversial studies, misrepresenting foundational research, and ignoring the field’s substantial contributions and ongoing evolution, Mikanowski’s essay does a disservice to readers. The real story is not one of collapse but of renewal — a scientific field embracing higher standards of evidence while continuing to illuminate the profound ways in which social contexts shape human thought and behavior.
John V. Petrocelli
Professor of Psychology
Wake Forest University
Mandy Hütter
Professor of psychology
University of Tübingen, Germany
Dolores Albarracín
Department of Psychology and Annenberg School for Communication
University of Pennsylvania
