The new year began with good news: our Laboratory, together with the Cognitive Research Laboratory of the RANEPA, won the RFBR grant to study the replicability of experiments in the field of cognitive psychology using virtual reality technologies.

This study is carried out in the context of the replication crisis in modern psychology: according to the results of a large-scale study of the Open Science Collaboration, out of 100 psychological experiments, the results of which were presented in three leading psychological journals, 61% were not able to replicate with the same levels of significance as in the original works (see graphic).

We will design replication experiments in virtual reality, conduct them and compare the results with experiments in physical space. The main idea is that VR will standardize the environment of the experiment, which should eliminate the influence of situational factors. From a microsociological point of view, this sounds like a challenge: “Is it possible to exclude the social from the situation?”

The next 2 years will be interesting!

Results of the replication of 100 experiments of the Open Science Collaboration (2015). Source: Nature