Why Did It Take So Many Decades for the Behavioral Sciences to Develop a Sense of Crisis Around Methodology and Replication?

Abstract

For several decades, leading behavioral scientists have offered strong criticisms of the common practice of null hypothesis significance testing as producing spurious findings without strong theoretical or empirical support. But only in the past decade has this manifested as a full-scale replication crisis. We consider some possible reasons why, on or about December 2010, the behavioral sciences changed.