Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is Planet Money from NPR.
Alexi Horowitz-Gazi.
Mary Childs.
Yes, you and I took a little trip up to scenic Montreal, one of the jewels of French Canada, for a little Planet Money mission.
Yes, we did. And even though it's a little bit sad that that mission did not entail joining the Maple Harvest or, you know, like infiltrating a poutine cartel. Next time. Dare I say next time. It did have much bigger implications for anybody and everybody whose life is impacted by science, which I think is basically all of us.
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Chapter 2: What is the replication crisis and why is it important?
I think that's right. Yeah. We were there to meet a guy named Abel Brodeur. Abel is this very energetic economics professor in his late 30s at the University of Ottawa. And we found him bounding around the halls of this modernist school building in downtown Montreal. He was getting ready to host an event he's become sort of famous for, something called the Replication Games.
It's getting exciting now. How are you feeling? I'm feeling good. It's the beginning of the event, so this is the moment I'm full of energy and full of enthusiasm. In seven hours from now, it's going to be a different conversation. Abel is going to be tired in seven hours because at a replication game, he is running around between 16 teams of three to five people in a kind of hackathon.
People will work all day to replicate recently published social science papers to reproduce the results and see if the findings hold up.
Because ever since technology has made it easy to crunch data, we've been able to go back and check old research. And turns out, it wasn't great. Rerunning an old study today a lot of the time does not yield the same result. The research no longer proves its conclusion. And the same thing often happens when we reconduct whole experiments.
Altogether, these problems have become known as the replication crisis.
A lot of people across academia have been trying to fix this so we can trust research, so we can actually know what we know. And this event, the replication games, it's part of a Bell's attempt to help solve this crisis. The idea is to change norms through monitoring. And just giving a small percentage, a small chance that we will monitor can massively change the behavior of everyone.
You know, change the way they behave, change the way they code, change the way they do research. So that's the goal.
After a few minutes, we head into a big lecture hall where Abel takes center stage.
All right, folks, we're gonna get started. Welcome to the Reputation Games. Thanks for being here in Montreal with us.
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Chapter 3: Who is Abel Brodeur and what are the Replication Games?
Let's get started. Today we have 16 papers that are being reproduced. Around the room, dozens of social scientists are gazing up at a bell, looking a little bit nervous. Most of them have come from across Canada, and most of them are first-timers who now have to undergo this kind of awkward initiation rite.
I'm going to put the music because I know you guys need like, you know, a little bit of motivation, but you need to do the body movement. Everybody has to do it. All right. Does it sound good? So we do it. I need you to do. It's pretty easy.
Abel starts didactically clapping like an elder millennial camp counselor and his audience joins in.
Guys, thank you so much for being here. I hope you enjoy. It should be fun. And thanks everyone.
Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi.
And I'm Mary Childs. Over the past couple decades, the world of science has been stuck in an existential crisis over whether we know the things we think we know. It started in psychology, spread to medicine and economics. Now people across disciplines are trying to figure out how to solve it.
Today on the show, the story of one economist, how he set out to learn what exactly has broken in the way social scientists create new knowledge, and how he came up with his own daring and kind of wacky way to help fix it by building an internationally crowdsourced surveillance system to keep social scientists honest.
Okay, so the replication crisis has been a pretty big deal for almost 20 years at this point. We've covered it on Planet Money before. The story of how economist Abel Broder first encountered the problem and why he set out to help fix it begins back in 2011.
Abel was getting his master's in economics, and he was writing a paper on whether smoking bans in restaurants and workplaces actually made people smoke less. He collected this huge data set.
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Chapter 4: How did Abel's personal experience shape his view on research integrity?
And we run after them.
Jolene. Did I talk to you for a sec?
Yes.
I'm Alexi. Just set the scene for me.
So we just finished clapping a cheesy opening song and we're about to split up into rooms.
The groups are scattering into classrooms across the building to start digging into their papers. Economics PhD student Jolene Hunt and her team are looking at a paper about education. They're all education economists. And so Jolene has sort of a pedagogical view of the day.
In PhDs, we often don't get a chance to actually work together. We're usually just kind of on your own in your silo, and then you talk to each other when you're having problems. But it'll be nice to actually work together and see if my friends are actually any good at their jobs.
Rolling up their sleeves, getting down to the actual coding. Because they're only going to have seven hours, each group has a little list of the things they've decided they're going to try to get through today. There's one group led by a guy named Thibaut Dupre, who is sitting alert and ready to unpack a paper about pensions in different countries.
Essentially, the paper focuses on 10-something countries, but then the data set seems to have a few more countries in there. So why some countries were included, others were not? What if you drop a few countries out of the data set? Maybe there's something to be explored there. And we wanted to understand the stakes for the day.
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Chapter 5: What is P-hacking and why is it a concern in academic research?
It depends what you define as success. Well, the process working as it's supposed to. I mean, in a world in which science works, I think this should have been picked up before it's published, cited, and disseminated. So I don't think it's a success. That's fair.
These papers they're replicating have been published, meaning they got past journal referees, professional economists who are supposed to be gatekeeping the quality of what they publish. Some of the top journals do check that the code runs. They press play. But in the government trust case, the journal referees apparently didn't catch that numbers were missing.
That when the paper said, oh, the documentation is in the replication package, it was pointing to nothing.
The journal declined to comment, though they said they have a robust process to investigate concerns. To me, this is a failure of the system, which is fine. There's always going to be failures. I just think that the rate of failures is higher than what a lot of people think. Yeah. And it shouldn't happen that often. In every replication game so far, they have found something.
Though not yet any career-ending fraud. It's more like major data or coding errors or robustness fails.
So the broader system is still broken, even after putting on more than 50 games and replicating about 300 papers.
Still, there are signs that the games are having an effect. Several replication gamers told us their experience here will change how they do their research, because they know that their papers, too, might someday end up under Abel's spotlight.
Abel says the more games he can put on, the more the rest of the academic world will start to shift. Because the evidence shows that people don't actually change their behavior based on the severity of the potential punishment, like losing their job or public shaming or whatever. They change behavior based on the odds of enforcement, the odds of actually getting caught.
Just the idea that someone might walk through their apartment one day, that's enough of a threat to keep it clean. Hey listeners, what are you doing on the evening of Monday, April 6th? Are you free? Because if you are, I think you should come to the 92nd Street Y to hang out with me and some of my friends.
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