The Replication Crisis in Psychology (2015 Open Science Collaboration)

The Replication Crisis in Psychology exposed a systemic failure when the 2015 Open Science Collaboration attempted to reproduce 100 landmark studies in health psychology and behavioral medicine. Only 36% produced the same results, undermining decades of widely cited work on stress, willpower, priming, and therapeutic interventions. This rate of failure was far worse than the 50% to 80% success rate often assumed by researchers, and it forced a reckoning that #8 on this list, the Stanford Prison Experiment, had already weathered for different reasons. The crisis revealed that influential findings, such as those linking ego depletion to decision-making or social priming to health behaviors, rested on far weaker foundations than previously believed, costing the field an estimated $28 billion annually in wasted research.