Mary Childs

And when they looked at the distribution, they found a noticeable hump just above that 5% significance threshold.

Now, some of this could be because some people whose research only hit 6% didn't bother submitting.

But it could also be because some researchers were tweaking their data analysis to just barely get results that would be more likely to get published.

It took a long time before I realized actually the paper was well-known.

Before people started talking to me at conferences like, are you the Star Wars guy?

That's the moment I needed someone senior to tell me, no, this is really important what you're doing.

There had been efforts to solve parts of the replication crisis.

Some of the top journals had started asking their contributors to release replication packages with their papers.

That's basically the data and code they'd use to find their results.

And researchers were also starting to pre-register their hypotheses before actually doing the research.

So that if the data didn't support it, they couldn't futz around and pretend like they'd been looking for something else all along.

How do I change the incentives?

How do I potentially have an impact on the norms?

How people do research?

The second I think about the norms, I think about, oh, it needs to be large scale.

Nobody's going to change their behavior if it's a small-scale thing.

So it needs to be big.

Journals do have peer-review systems where they try to poke holes in research, but they didn't always totally get under the hood to scrutinize all the code and data.

So researchers weren't necessarily worried that their stuff would get checked.

A nice analogy, I think, is imagine you go on a date.