In a video [5] released today at Edge.org, psychologist Simone Schnall raises interesting questions about the role of replication in social psychology and about what counts as "admissible evidence" in science.

Schnall comes at the topic from recent experience: One of her studies was selected for a replication attempt by a registered replication project, and the replication failed to find the effect from her original study. ...

In the new video — from a talk she gave to a group of social scientists in September — Schnall considers the different levels of scrutiny received by different researchers and for different findings. She draws on the legal distinction made by Herbert Packer in 1964 — the distinction between "due process" models of law, for which the burden of proof is very high and the focus is on avoiding wrongful convictions, and "crime control" models of law, for which the burden of proof is much lower and the aim is to prevent any perpetrators from slipping through. ...