Those who’ve been following the most recent controversy over the replicability of psychological findings (see here, here, here, here, and here for a primer), may be interested in the latest output from the PsyBorgs Digital History of Psychology Laboratory. Michael Pettit (left) has created an interactive timeline of replication controversies over psychology’s history:
This interactive timeline offers the reader a brief guide to this longer history. I define replication fairly broadly, but attempt to not simply offer a history of psychology in its entirety. Instead, I have focused on famous replication controversies from the past alongside the development of psychology’s favored research methods.
I am personally quite agnostic as to the value of the current interest in direct replication. My worry is that it distracts (as is often the case in psychology) from questions of external validity. My goal is to provide a richer context for contemporary controversies animating psychology.
I welcome corrections, updates, and suggestions of relevant topics. Please contact me at mpettit at yorku.ca
The timeline can be explored in full here.
It is often thought that “old” experiments — especially in topics like social psychology — may not reveal very much about how people would behave today. Today’s people, the story is often told, are more sophisticated than the lock-step dupes of times past. This “explanation” is often repeated even in the face of modern replications showing that people are as just as likely, for instance, to give severe electrical shocks to strangers as they were back in the early 1960s (
The March 2008 issue of the journal Science & Education, guest edited by Ryan Tweney, reports replications of five historically significant psychological practices and studies that were conducted by graduate students at Bowling Green State University where Tweney is an emeritus professor of psychology.
The BBC documentary program “Horizon” has partially replicated the landmark sensory deprivation experiments of the 1950s and 1960s. Interest in these studies has been spurred anew by recent 
Stanley Milgram’s obedience studies of the early 1960s have been something of a staple on this blog (e.g., 
As almost everyone knows, back in the early 1960s, Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted a study in which subjects were persuaded to deliver what appeared to be increasingly severe electric shocks to a confederate (who they thought to be simply another subject), often up to the point apparently killing the other person. There have long been questions about whether the study could be replicated, until it was done in an