How to ensure that results in psychology (and other fields) are replicated has become a popular topic of discussion recently. There's no doubt that many results fail to replicate, and also, that people don't even try to replicate findings as much as they should.
Yet psychologist Gregory Francis warns that replication per se is not always a good thing: Publication bias and the failure of replication in experimental psychology
Among experimental psychologists, successful replication enhances belief in a finding, while a failure to replicate is often interpreted to mean that one of the experiments is flawed. This view is wrong.
Because experimental psychology uses statistics, empirical findings should appear with predictable probabilities. In a misguided effort to demonstrate successful replication of empirical findings and avoid failures to replicate, experimental psychologists sometimes report too many positive results.
Rather than strengthen confidence in an effect, too much successful replication actually indicates publication ...
