A version of The Thinker displayed in Buenos Aires

By guest blogger Jesse Singal

As most observers of psychological science recognise, the field is in the midst of a replication crisis. Multiple high-profile efforts to replicate past findings have turned up some dismal results — in the 2015 Open Science Collaboration published in Science, for example, just 36% of the evaluated studies showed statistically significant effects the second time around. The results of Many Labs 2, published last year, weren’t quite as bad, but still pretty dismal: just 50% of studies replicated during that effort.

Some of these failed replications don’t come across as all that surprising, at least in retrospect, given the audacity of original claims. For example, a study published in Science in 2012 claimed that subjects who looked at an image of The Thinker had, on average, a 20-point lower belief in God on…