Author Archives: Patrick Smela

Patrick is currently finishing his Bachelor in Psychology at the University Vienna. Afterwards, he will to do his Masters in General Psychology and Methodology. He is passionate about research methods, especially in the field Human Computer Interaction. Besides work, he likes to travel, read, and does a lot of voluntary work in the psychological faculty in Vienna.

Exploratory and Confirmatory Hypothesis Testing

Introduction

The replication crisis has spread all across the scientific community. In the field of psychology, scientists were not able to replicate more than half of previous findings (Open Science Collaboration, 2015). For a long time this problem went unnoticed, but a critical moment occurred when Daryl Bem published his now infamous paper on humans’ ability to quite literally predict the future (Bem, 2011). Many readers doubted his findings as there was no logical basis for the ability to predict the future and years later Daniel Engber summarized it nicely when he wrote:

(…) the paper posed a very difficult dilemma. It was both methodologically sound and logically insane. (…). If you bought into those results, you’d be admitting that much of what you understood about the universe was wrong. If you rejected them, you’d be admitting something almost as momentous: that the standard methods of psychology cannot be trusted, and that much of what gets published in the field—and thus, much of what we think we understand about the mind—could be total bunk.“ (Engber, 2017)

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Patrick Smela

Patrick is currently finishing his Bachelor in Psychology at the University Vienna. Afterwards, he will to do his Masters in General Psychology and Methodology. He is passionate about research methods, especially in the field Human Computer Interaction. Besides work, he likes to travel, read, and does a lot of voluntary work in the psychological faculty in Vienna.

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