Cultural Change Over Time: Why Replicability Should Not Be the Gold Standard in Psychological Science

Abstract

By continuing to focus on the necessity for replication, psychological science misses an important and all-pervasive psychological phenomenon: the impact of social and cultural change on behavior. Or put otherwise, our discipline misinterprets failure to replicate behavioral results if we do not consider that social and cultural change can produce systematic shifts in behavior. Data on the connection between social change and behavioral change point to a new role for “replication”: not to show that results can be duplicated, but to reveal behavioral effects of sociodemographic and cultural change in the intervening years between original and replicated procedure, whether those be surveys, standardized behavioral procedures, or intelligence tests.

Keywords

culture diversity intergroup relations

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