The History of the Replication Crisis

3min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

I wanted to distinguish though two different things that we could mean when we're talking about the replication crisis. The first is someone tries to faithfully do the same study on the same population or almost identical populations, you know, trying to make it as close as possible to the original and doesn't find the same effect. The second is more of a generalizability issue where the effect is real on that exact population in that exact setting, but if you try to move it to a slightly different setting or a different population, it fails to generalize.

Read the full transcript here.

Can giving people a sense of agency and dignity be better than giving them access to food, shelter, clothing, or cash? And what exactly can be done in practice to expand human agency? How does the value of agency-oriented interventions compare to the value of more tangible interventions? How robust are the findings about all of the above in light of the replication crisis? In general, how much confidence should we place (with or without the replication crisis) in the findings of social science research? How tight should the feedback loop be for organizations that do both research for and implementation of charitable interventions?

Richard Sedlmayr works with a private foundation called the Wellspring Philanthropic Fund, where he funds research and innovation to promote pro-poor economic development. He is also involved in the setup of The Agency Fund, a philanthropic partnership investing in ideas and organizations that support people in the navigation of difficult lives. Richard's background is in behavioral, development, and financial economics, and he has a PhD in Public Policy from Oxford. Richard has lived in a dozen countries and is currently based in the Bay Area. You can get in touch with him on LinkedIn.

Staff