In short
The “replication crisis” in social science and how economist Abel Brodeur’s “Replication Games” try to fix it by crowdsourcing audits of published papers—checking code/data and running robustness tests to see if results hold.
Guests (named in transcript)
Alexi Horowitz-Gazi (Planet Money host), Mary Childs (Planet Money host), Abel Brodeur (University of Ottawa economics professor; organizer of Replication Games; Institute for Replication). Additional featured participants: Jolene Hunt (economics PhD student, education paper team), Thibaut Dupre (pensions paper team), Brielle/“Brielle” (University of Saskatchewan; agriculture paper team), Shichia Wu (University of Ottawa; agriculture paper team), Felix Fosu (Queens University postdoc; cartel paper team), David Benatia (professor on team), Simon Prevo and Scott Morier (government-trust paper team), Giacomo Battiston, Marco Lemollier, Paolo Pinotti (cartel paper authors), plus Marco Lemollier and Paolo Pinotti are quoted.
Key claims
Incentives and “p-hacking” around p<0.05 drive unreliable findings; enforcement odds matter more than punishment severity; replication events change researchers’ behavior.
Notable examples
Abel’s 2011 smoking-ban paper initially found “significant” results only via data “torturing,” so he published null findings; Replication Games in Montreal found missing variables in a government-trust paper and that removing one cartel made a Mexico cartel study’s results insignificant.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOExploring the Replication Games
0:45 to 2:52
Discussion on Abel Brodeur and the purpose of the Replication Games.
“It did have much bigger implications for anybody and everybody whose life is impacted by science, which I think is basically all of us.”
The Replication Crisis
2:52 to 4:34
Examination of the replication crisis in social sciences and its implications.
“Thanks for being here in Montreal with us.”
Abel's Journey into Research
6:20 to 11:38
Abel Brodeur's experiences with research and the replication crisis in detail.
“Okay, so the replication crisis has been a pretty big deal for almost 20 years at this point.”
Creating the Institute for Replication
11:38 to 14:01
Abel's initiative to address replication issues through an official institute.
“Before people started talking to me at conferences, like, are you just Star Wars guy?”
The Institute for Replication: Founding and First Steps
14:01 to 18:15
Learn about the challenges and solutions in establishing a replication effort in academia.
“You could make sure there weren't any errors, conscious or unconscious, in what they'd done.”
The First Replication Game: Unexpected Challenges
18:15 to 18:54
Discover the unforeseen complications Abel faced during the first replication event.
“Abel was a little afraid he might be about to discover that all papers were full of worms and that science wasn't real.”
Inside a Real-Life Replication Game
20:53 to 28:00
Experience the atmosphere and objectives of a replication game event firsthand.
“So we are at a replication game in real life in Montreal.”
Investigating Research Validity
28:00 to 31:16
Learn about the challenges and findings of students replicating research papers.
“The kind of things they might find in this phase?”
The Implications of Findings
31:16 to 37:44
Explore the ethical and professional dilemmas faced by researchers post-replication.
“For sure, when you do this kind of papers, you do this kind of things, right?”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00Adam Davidson:Support for NPR and the following message come from Edward Jones. What does it mean to live a rich life? Maybe it's full of brave first leaps, tearful goodbyes, and everything in between. And with over 100 years of experience, your Edward Jones financial advisor can help. Edward Jones, member SIPC. This is Planet Money from NPR.
0:26Abel Brodeur:Alexi Horowitz-Gazi.
0:28Adam Davidson:Mary Childs.
0:29Abel Brodeur: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.
0:36Adam Davidson: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.
0:56Abel Brodeur: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 a moment I'm full of energy and full of enthusiasm. In seven hours from now, it's going to be a different conversation.
1:31Adam Davidson: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.
1:48Abel Brodeur: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.
2:14Adam Davidson: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 Abel'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.
2:44Abel Brodeur:After a few minutes, we head into a big lecture hall where Abel takes center stage. All right, folks, we're going to get started. Welcome to the Reputation Games. Thanks for being here in Montreal with us. Let's get started. Today we have 16 papers that are being reproduced. A couple of small things...
3:01Adam Davidson:Around the room, dozens of social scientists are gazing up at Abel, 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 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.
3:29Abel Brodeur: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.
3:44Adam Davidson:Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Alexi Horowitz-Gazi.
3:47Abel Brodeur: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.
4:04Adam Davidson: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.
4:31Adam Davidson:This message comes from Dell. Dell PCs with Intel inside are built for the moments that matter. Like a big project that can't be interrupted by an update With long-lasting battery life, you can stay focused on what matters. Built for you. Dell.com slash Dell PCs. Support for this podcast and the following message come from E-Trade from Morgan Stanley. Simplify your finances and discover the convenience of investing in banking all in one place. Plus, get up to$1 ,500 when you open a brokerage account with a qualifying deposit today. Learn more at E-Trade.com slash offer. Banking products and services are provided by Morgan Stanley Private Bank, National Association, member FDIC.
5:16Adam Davidson:Terms and other fees apply. Investing involves risks. Morgan Stanley Smith Barney LLC, member SIPC. This message comes from LinkedIn. Owning a small business comes with a lot of challenges and means juggling multiple things at once. It's even harder to do it efficiently. But with LinkedIn, you get all the tools you need to grow in one place. With LinkedIn, simplify your sales, marketing, and hiring so that you can actually run your small business. Learn more at linkedin.com slash planetmoneyshow. This message comes from Capella University. You know that feeling when there's a spark building inside you, that you were meant for more?
5:53Adam Davidson:That's your own drive pushing you towards what's next. Capella University gets that. With their FlexPath learning format, you can set the pace and earn your degree without putting life on pause. You've built experience and know what you're capable of. Now, this is your time to turn that momentum into more. The only real question is, what can't you do? Learn more at capella.edu. 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.
6:36Abel Brodeur: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. I had like amazing data from the CDC, which is public. I had smoking prevalence at the county level.
6:53Adam Davidson:Abel says that all the established research at the time indicated that smoking bans were hugely effective, that they'd gotten lots of people to stop smoking. But when Abel crunched his numbers? I was finding absolutely no effect. None. It was like, nobody stopped smoking. I've played with the data for six months, and I find nothing. And Abel was trying to make a name for himself in academia, which means getting his research published in an academic journal. And it's harder to get published if you find no effect, especially given that the existing literature did show an effect. So what Abel needed was something statistically significant.
7:30Abel Brodeur:For the statistically uninitiated, significant means the result would be produced by chance less than 5 % of the time. So the probability that the result is just random is 5 % or less. That is the cutoff for whether your findings count or not. There's this 95%, 5 % cutoff that really matters. We're obsessed with these thresholds.
7:50Adam Davidson:So Abel kept tinkering with his dataset, changing his computer code to contort the data one way and then another, until eventually one day he found a way to analyze one subset of his data that gave him what he'd been looking for. A result demonstrating that smoking bans had decreased smoking. And a result that was significant. He's like, there you go. I was so happy. I was in the library. I just yelled, like, significant. I was so happy.
8:14Abel Brodeur:Finding a significant result meant that if his paper was published, he would get to put a little asterisk or star next to his results. And the more statistically significant the result, the more stars you got to claim.
8:28Adam Davidson:But Abel's happiness did not last long. Because the more he thought about how he'd gotten that significant result, the more it started to seem like it was working against the whole goal of social science. You know, to actually discover true new knowledge about human behavior.
8:43Abel Brodeur:For example, policymakers need to know whether smoking bans work to make sound policy decisions. But here he was torturing the data to match the preconceived hypothesis. He thought, This is so stupid. What am I doing? I'm writing a piece saying that smoking bans are decreasing smoking prevalence. Because I managed to find one that worked. I was like, this is dumb. I'm doing something wrong.
9:06Adam Davidson:Abel ultimately decided not to use his tortured results. He wrote up his paper showing that he'd found no effect, even if it meant his paper was less exciting. And at first, he thought what he'd done to his data might have just been a one-off mistake on his part. But then you start talking to other students and people are like, oh yeah, that's how you publish. Abel started to see that this was a problem of incentives. In order to advance their careers, academics have to publish papers in peer-reviewed journals. And the journals want to publish work that's statistically significant and novel. These papers can win big prizes and define new research agendas for decades.
9:45Abel Brodeur:But because of all that, people were doing what he had done, trimming and squeezing and coaxing the data towards significant results. And that can easily cross over into a kind of data manipulation called P-hacking. P as in probability. And Nabel says it can happen almost subconsciously. Because the project took like three, four years of back and forth between co-authors, discussion. Then six months later, you go back, you exclude again these other people, you do something different. And then over time, all these decisions, actually, when you look at it from the outside, it's like, this is crazy what you've done.
10:20Adam Davidson:To figure out how widespread this problem might be, Abel decided to research the research. He and a couple of his colleagues scraped the significance data from a bunch of the top academic journals. the distribution of stars that published researchers had racked up. And when they looked at the distribution, they found a noticeable hump just above that 5 % significance threshold. Now, some of this could be because some people whose research only hit 6 % didn't bother submitting. But it could also be because some researchers were tweaking their data analysis to just barely get results that would be more likely to get published.
10:56Abel Brodeur:But when Abel and his colleagues started submitting the research for publication, they got a resounding series of no's. Academic publishing seemed hesitant to open up an empirical reckoning. After a few years, they did manage to publish their paper in 2016. They called it Star Wars The Empirics Strike Back. Do you get it? Oh, you definitely get it. Thank you, Alexi. So Abel puts aside this whole idea of an empirical reckoning, and he moves on to other economic projects. He gets tenure, and eventually he learns that his little paper has become kind of a sleeper hit. It took a long time before I realized actually the paper was like well known.
11:38Before people started talking to me at conferences, like, are you just Star Wars guy? That's a moment like I needed someone senior to tell me like, no, this is really important what you're doing.
11:46Adam Davidson:There had been efforts to solve parts of the replication crisis. Some of the top journals had started asking their contributors to release replication packages with their papers. That's basically the data and code they'd use to find their results. And researchers were also starting to pre-register their hypotheses before actually doing the research. So that if the data didn't support it, they couldn't futz around and pretend like they'd been looking for something else all along.
12:11Abel Brodeur:For his part, Abel wondered if there was anything he could do. Like, not just study the problem, but actually help fix it. How do I change the incentives? How do I potentially have an impact on the norms? How people do research? The second I think about the norms, I think about, oh, it needs to be large-scale. Nobody's going to change their behavior if it's a small-scale thing. So it needs to be big.
12:35Adam Davidson:Journals do have peer-reviewed systems where they try to poke holes in research. But they didn't always totally get under the hood to scrutinize all the code and data. So researchers weren't necessarily worried that their stuff would get checked. A nice analogy, I think, is imagine you go on a date. You might shave, might take care of your body, might take care of yourself. A bit of deodorant, you know, perfume maybe if it's your thing. You're going to make an effort to look prettier than you are usually. The other person fully understand that this is a nice version of you. We're fully aware of that, but I don't know by much.
13:12And perhaps it's not. Or maybe you made a massive effort and usually you're a disaster. You never clean nothing. So when you go to the apartment, it's like, oh my goodness, this is your apartment? So research a bit like this.
13:27Abel Brodeur:The published research is the cleaned up version. So when I see a published paper, I know it's been, you know, it's beautiful. It looks nice. But there's an information asymmetry. I don't know how dirty it is, actually.
13:43Adam Davidson:Abel thought one thing that might help this problem was to make researchers care as much about the cleanliness of their data analysis as the significance of their results. And to do that, he'd have to go full-on room raiders on people's published papers to shine a fluorescent spotlight on the backrooms of their research. If you could take all of the data that somebody had gathered for a given paper and meticulously retrace their coding steps, you could see if it was possible to replicate their findings. You could make sure there weren't any errors, conscious or unconscious, in what they'd done.
14:14Abel Brodeur:But first, he'd have to get the code. People weren't in the habit then of publishing all their data and code. And when he emailed researchers asking, nobody responded. So he decided to create an official seeming institution. It needs to be a big institution with a website with tons of famous people on it. And when you send the email, people will be like, what the hell is this thing? I need to respond. It's legit. So in 2022, he creates a website for a thing he starts calling the Institute for Replication. A friend of mine, his wife, did the logo for free, like a design. Like, you know, I mean, like just bare bones.
14:52Adam Davidson:He recruits some serious, famous economists for the board to put on his legit-looking website. And pretty soon, he does start to get responses to some of his emails. He's able to get some data sets and coding packages. And he convinces some colleagues and junior researchers to start doing some replications one by one. in exchange for a co-author credit on one big paper.
15:13Abel Brodeur:So Abel can get the data and the code, but there's still a second problem, which was the question of scale. Replicating one paper at a time was not going to do much to change the system. What he needed was to create the sense within the academic community that anybody's work could be checked at any time. It's like an IRS for the ivory tower. So then I thought, OK, we need to mass reproduce journals. So then I was like, okay, I need to get maybe a few hundred replications or reproductions per year. And I'm thinking, how do you do that?
15:44Adam Davidson:The answer, Abel says, came to him kind of by accident. Around the time he got his Potemkin website up and running, he got an unrelated invitation to a conference in Oslo to a couple of seminars. He was planning his trip about a month ahead of time, and he noticed that he had seminars on a Wednesday and on a Friday. And I thought, like, what the hell am I going to do on Thursday? Like, I've never been to Oslo. I'm sure it's pretty and nice, but a full day, like I'm going to walk around and then I'm going to have like six, eight hours just to relax. So I just emailed the person who invited me and I said, could we just like do a small workshop?
Read the full transcript
16:18Abel Brodeur:It would just be like 10, maybe 15 people. Abel posted about it on social media. You can come to Oslo. It should be fun. If you come, you're going to get co-authorship to a meta paper. We're going to reproduce papers. Let's have fun. And then, I don't know, like 70, 80 people ended up registering really fast. I closed registration. because I have no money. We don't want to have food. I didn't tell the guy it would be 80. I said it would be 10.
16:42Adam Davidson:So Abella's sitting there a couple months before the conference with this sudden unexpected surge of interest and no plan. I have 80 people. Some coming from Ireland, others come from Sweden, others coming from France. Like, what do I do with these people?
16:55Abel Brodeur:He starts collecting papers that people could replicate and he puts everyone into teams by their field. Health economics, development economics. The first time I had no idea what was going on. I was super stressed.
17:06Adam Davidson:He had no idea what was going to happen, what they would find. Abel heads to Oslo and convenes the first ever replication game in October of 2022. And when he checks in on one of the first teams of replicators working on the first paper... I go talk to them and they're like, Abel, there's a problem. Like, there's tons of duplicates. I'm like, what? He's like, yeah, you're one of the data sets. Like, there's tons of people with the same age. And then I come back later on and it's like, okay, 75 % of one data set. Everybody's 62 years old, all women, all living in the same village, all doing the same thing.
17:38It's the same, it's duplicates. And it's a paper about inequality. If everybody's the same, there's no inequality. And that was driving some of the mechanism.
17:48Abel Brodeur:The underlying data, upon which this entire paper rested, had been merged improperly. Like a big copy and paste error. To Abel, this was disconcerting. And I was like, oh boy, that's the first paper. That's the first game. What did I create? It's going to be like this all the time. People finding crazy mistakes. And did I just open a can of worms that actually most papers are just like terrible, full of crazy golden errors?
18:15Adam Davidson:Abel was a little afraid he might be about to discover that all papers were full of worms and that science wasn't real. But luckily, by the end of the day, like many teams had like good day, everything was clean and so on. And it was like, it's like not terrible.
18:29Abel Brodeur:He could relax. It turns out most of the papers were not terrible. Even better, with that first event in Oslo, Abel had found a way to crowdsource this massive academic auditing project, essentially for free. If he could host enough replication games every year, he just might be able to scare the social sciences into acting right.
18:54Adam Davidson:But what actually happens on the ground during these things? After the break, we enter the 51st Replication Game.
19:38Adam Davidson:This message comes from Dell. Dell PCs with Intel inside are built for the moments that matter. Like a big project that can't be interrupted by an update. With long-lasting battery life, you can stay focused on what matters. Built for you. Dell.com slash Dell PC. This message comes from LinkedIn. Owning a small business comes with a lot of challenges and means juggling multiple things at once. It's even harder to do it efficiently. But with LinkedIn, you get all the tools you need to grow in one place. With LinkedIn, simplify your sales, marketing, and hiring so that you can actually run your small business.
20:17Adam Davidson:Learn more at linkedin.com slash planetmoneyshow. This message comes from Whole Foods Market.
20:24Abel Brodeur:Save on seasonal favorites at Whole Foods Market. Start in the vibrant produce department, stocked with organic fruits and veggies. Then head to prepared foods for easy grab-and-go lunches and dinners. There are so many ways to save. Those yellow sales signs are just about everywhere. Plus, Prime members can find extra in-store deals every Tuesday and Friday. And the low-priced$365 by Whole Foods Market brand never sacrifices on quality. Save today and every day at Whole Foods Market. So we are at a replication game in real life in Montreal. Abel Brodeur says that the game part is a little bit of a branding exercise.
21:01Abel Brodeur:There are no winners or prizes. It's more like an all-day hackathon.
21:06Adam Davidson:The teams are mostly economists with a few groups of psychologists, and they've already chosen the papers they'll focus on. Using just what they have in the replication package, they will have seven hours to check the code, examine the decisions their paper's authors made, and see if the results reproduce. And then they'll report on whatever they find, so it'll be out there on the record, whether that's a nothing burger or a bombshell.
21:29Abel Brodeur:After everyone claps their rendition of We Will Replicate You, the researchers start streaming out of the lecture hall, and we run after them.
21:39Adam Davidson:Jolene! Can I talk to you for a sec? Yeah.
21:42Abel Brodeur:Hey.
21:43Adam Davidson:I'm Alexi. Oh, hi, Alexi. Just set the scene for me.
21:47Abel Brodeur: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.
22:16Adam Davidson:But it'll be nice to actually work together and see if my friends are actually any good at their jobs.
22:21Abel Brodeur: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?
22:51Adam Davidson:Maybe there's something to be explored there. And we wanted to understand the stakes for the day. You know, why people would attend this event to do a full day of manual economic labor for no dollars. So we asked them. What are you doing here today? Well, we're trying to see if we can replicate the results from a paper that took a look into the effects of negotiations.
23:19Abel Brodeur:I've started with a group in the lecture hall huddled around their laptops. Freel Lasued is a researcher at the University of Saskatchewan, and she's in a group of economists focused on agriculture with Shichia Wu from the University of Ottawa. You want to find that the paper checks out? Yes, you can think like that, yeah. In terms of your personal incentives, would it be cooler to find like, oh no, this paper's messed up?
23:46Adam Davidson:Brielle starts laughing, seemingly at the premise of the question.
23:49Abel Brodeur:You're laughing so hard, why? That's mean. I don't know, like how to answer it. This would be bad for Diego and Juan here.
24:01Adam Davidson:Those are the authors of the paper.
24:04Abel Brodeur:You just have sympathy for them. Yeah, because we've all been in their shoes. Okay, fair. But we go up to another group, and they're kind of like, duh. Yeah, we are trying to find something. That's Felix Fosu, a postdoc at Queens University. His group is digging into a paper about cartels in Mexico. I tell him what the other researchers said, that maybe it isn't very nice to want to find something terribly wrong in someone else's research. But it seems like, to Felix, I have now misunderstood things in the opposite direction. No, we definitely want to find something. Why? I think replication is something that we have to take very important in economics.
24:51We need to make sure that our results are indeed claiming what they claim to be. We need to know what works and what does not work.
24:58Adam Davidson:Now, regardless of their specific goals, the actual work of replication is divided into two main phases. Phase one is the same for every team, pure and simple replication. They will all check the paper's code, the programmed instructions that take some raw data and put it into a bunch of tables that comprise the foundations for the paper's conclusions.
25:19Abel Brodeur:So now each team takes the original code, copy and pastes it, and basically hits enter to see if it runs.
25:25Adam Davidson:And one type of mistake that they might find is if the code is really broken. They might find that when they push the button, the code just doesn't run. The computer just says error.
25:35Abel Brodeur:Or another kind of mistake they might find. Maybe the code runs, great, but it spits out a different answer than what the authors wrote. Not so great. Or maybe the raw data is messed up in some way, like cells merged or transposed or erased or accidentally filled down the whole column.
25:52Adam Davidson:So we ask the agriculture team to show us exactly what they are doing.
25:56Abel Brodeur:So I can't code. I don't know what I'm looking at. What am I looking at? Well, actually, it's kind of nothing here because I just started.
26:04Adam Davidson:This is Chishia again. The paper her team picked by Diego and Juan Pablo is about the price of eggs at big firms versus small firms. How much pricing control they have.
26:14Abel Brodeur:I look at her laptop over her shoulder. So what you can see here is the variables they have. We have the firms, we have the price, we have the day, month, and year. Now Chishia pulls out her iPad to scroll through the published paper. So we're going to firstly check whether we can perfectly reproduce all the numbers using the original data and codes. If I can run part of this, maybe you can see it. Okay, she's pushing a little blue arrow, a little play button. So basically if I run this code, you will see the results. Oh, a little box appeared in a different window. Yes. So if you check the numbers, minus 18.11432.
26:58Abel Brodeur:And I'm looking at the published version. It says minus 18.114 star star star. So they're basically exactly the same. It's the same. Yeah, it's the same. That's good, you know. So we have a win. Yeah. Yes, one. And we have more to check. A lot more. But we got one. That's great.
27:16Adam Davidson:Shishia will keep plugging in all the data and checking the results. Though so far, it looks like the paper is checking out.
27:23Abel Brodeur:And if the paper passes the whole first phase, if the code does spit out all the answers that the author said it would, then the replicators move on to phase two, robustness checks. For a robustness check, we kind of like change some parts of the model to see whether the original conclusion is still kind of makes sense. This phase is less objective and requires more context and thought. It requires the economist to consider the questions that the paper authors didn't think of or didn't write about. The decisions the authors made and the decisions they could have made but didn't. It's like trying to see the negative space in and around the paper.
28:02Adam Davidson:The kind of things they might find in this phase? You know, did the authors say that this data set represents something it doesn't? Did they use an appropriate data set? And did they use that data in a way that made sense? Did they include or exclude certain specifications or factors in order to have a result that looked exciting?
28:20Abel Brodeur:There are infinite potential choices that researchers make or don't make. And the replicators have such limited time, so they're not going to be able to consider and analyze everything. They're just going to get through as much as they can.
28:33Adam Davidson:And as the hours start to tick by, it becomes clear that most teams are not turning up major issues. Until mid-afternoon. We check in with this one group looking at a paper about government policies. The basic premise is when people trust the government, do they tend to comply with policy more? This is Simon Prevo. He's an econ master's student and a public sector researcher. The paper found that when people trust in government, they comply with policies more readily. So those policies cost the government less money. And Simon and his teammates are now trying to unravel a mystery. because when they went to look at the raw data that underlies the paper's findings, it looked a little funny.
29:14Adam Davidson:This is Scott Morier, another Econ Master student on the team. There was a folder called raw for the raw data, but the files were all labeled clean. So we were a bit confused to how, you know, it's counterintuitive, right? So Florian downloaded the data straight from the source and followed the instructions to create the one data set.
29:30Abel Brodeur:They recreated what should be the same data set following the instructions that the authors left. They ran the code.
29:37Adam Davidson:And then that's when we started getting the errors because variables were missing. And then as we kept going through, we kept finding more variables that were being used in the regression but weren't necessarily included in the supposedly what is meant to be the raw data set. Some variables are missing from the raw data set. The authors seem to have used data in their analysis that they did not account for. Not good.
29:59Abel Brodeur:And then we visited the group looking at that paper about cartel behavior in Mexico. That group has found something too. So in this paper, they look at the presence of different cartels.
30:10Adam Davidson:They tell us the paper looks at 20 cartels and data about what types of crimes were happening and when, to see if cartels changed the types of crime they did after the government ramped up a big war on drugs. What we found so far is that if you exclude one of the cartels, then the results become insignificant.
30:29Abel Brodeur:So it's just the one cartel making the results? The one cartel making the results. So if you remove only one, then the result collapse. Oh no, you found something.
30:38Adam Davidson:Yeah, they found something in the first test they tried.
30:41Abel Brodeur:Is that luck? Would you call that luck? No, I think it's something that we thought about it. That's why we place it one on the list. We thought it's a good place to search. So partly luck, but partly because we thought about it carefully. That sounds like not luck. They're going to keep investigating. And depending on what they find, this paper is maybe not passing this phase, the robustness check phase. Can you draw a big sweeping conclusion about the effectiveness of a war on drugs from a change in just one cartel? They suspect this paper will not hold up.
31:15Adam Davidson:Over lunch, the cartel team starts puzzling through, like, how does this sort of thing even happen?
31:21Abel Brodeur:You have to be honest. For sure, when you do this kind of papers, you do this kind of things, right? You check whether when you add this, you know, you do this type of robustness checks.
31:31Adam Davidson:David Benatia, a professor on the team, says this is a robustness check that he would have tried if he had been the author. At the end of the day, our researchers limp back into the auditorium to present what they'd all found. So the way we like to finish is to give each team about one minute to tell us how your day went, the different challenges you faced. Maybe we can start from the beginning, move around. We didn't find anything too major. There was a lot of missing variables and attrition. Did it replicate well? Like all the code ran, but... Everything ran fine. We tried to poke holes in it, but we couldn't really do it.
32:09Adam Davidson:For the 71 replicators in the Montreal game, 14 teams got to uphold science by double-checking some published work. They spent a day coding with their friends and peers, learned some new coding hacks, and new ways to make choices in research. And they'll get a little authorship credit on a meta paper in a real journal.
32:28Abel Brodeur:The other two teams, the group who discovered the missing numbers, the cartels group, they've gotten like a toxic golden ticket. Now they'll get to write their report, polite and formal, but nonetheless kind of a bombshell, saying just how flawed the research is.
32:43Adam Davidson:Maybe that makes a splash and everyone thinks they're brilliant. Or maybe it makes a splash and everyone hates them.
32:50Abel Brodeur:Next, Abel will write an email to the authors, a somewhat standardized note saying, hey, here's who we are and what we do. We found some mistakes in your paper. Would you like to respond? He does not assume nefarious intentions, and the authors get an opportunity to try to fix the problem and prepare their formal response before anything goes public.
33:13Adam Davidson:And because Abel handles it from his position at the Institute for Replication, it doesn't feel so personal. And the replicators have a little bit of insulation.
33:22Abel Brodeur:We asked Felix from the cartels group what this might mean for him as a more junior person, a person earlier in his career. It's kind of throwing rocks towards the top of the profession. He wanted to find something and now he has. I think it's a good work that we are doing, but what the implications are, I don't know. Yeah.
33:43Adam Davidson:Yeah, I will find out. So after a few months, Abel sends his neutral-toned official email to the authors of the paper that Felix and his team had replicated in Montreal, saying that the code had worked, but that they found the results don't hold up.
33:58Abel Brodeur:And for the authors of that paper, getting that email? When we opened that email, we were actually happy because we actually read your paper replicates. This is Giacomo Battiston, a researcher at the Rockwell Foundation in Berlin and one of the four co-authors of the paper. He says they were thrilled to have their coding results publicly validated.
34:20Adam Davidson:And when it came to the bigger problem, the fact that their results had fallen apart when the replicators removed that one cartel. We were not particularly worried about the content because it was kind of self-evident that this was not really challenging.
34:34Abel Brodeur:Not really challenging their findings because they think the replicators misunderstood the basic hypothesis of their study. They say they started with this idea that there was this one big new cartel in Mexico, Los Zetas, and it had been doing a lot of crimes, generating a lot of data points. Here's another author, Marco Lemollier, a researcher at Bocconi University in Milan. When we start to think about this project, actually we had in mind the specific cartel of Los Zetas.
35:03Adam Davidson:They say they set out to investigate if the cartel Los Zetas had changed the types of crimes they did after the war on drugs. And their papers succeeded at proving that.
35:12Abel Brodeur:What the Montreal replicators did, in the opinion of the paper authors, was to remove the main part of the data set and then say the conclusion was broken. You can do that, but why would you?
35:24Adam Davidson:To be blunt, it doesn't make any sense. That is Paolo Pinotti, a professor also at Baconi University. He said it was like doing a study on the effect of spreadsheets on productivity and then saying, oh, but the results don't hold up if you exclude Microsoft Excel.
35:39Abel Brodeur:We looked at their paper. And to be fair to the replicators, the original paper does not say explicitly, hey, it's just Los Edas we're focusing on. The data from Los Edas is lumped in with several other new cartels. So if the paper authors meant to study the behavior of just Los Edas, that was never quite spelled out.
35:59Adam Davidson:Barry, when we first rocked up to the replication games back in May, I think we were both excited at the idea that we might watch some junior economists uncover some major problem with a published paper in real time. But Abel had a different take when we asked him about the problems that the teams there had uncovered. Like the team, for example, that had found issues in the government trust paper. That seems like success. Success, 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.
36:39So I don't think it's a success. That's fair.
36:42Abel Brodeur: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.
37:06Adam Davidson: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.
37:36Abel Brodeur:So the broader system is still broken, even after putting on more than 50 games and replicating about 300 papers.
37:43Adam Davidson: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.
37:57Abel Brodeur: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.
38:31Abel Brodeur: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. It is the first debut stop on our 12-city book tour to celebrate the publication of our first-ever book, Planet Money, a guide to the economic forces that shape your life. Every stop on this tour will be unique with different hosts and guests. And if you get a ticket, you can get a tour-exclusive tote bag with your purchase while supplies last. So at the 92nd Street Y on Monday, April 6th, it'll be me, Amanda Aronjik, Darian Woods, book author Alex Noyasi, and the economist Emily Oster, who is most famous, I think, for letting pregnant women know that they can actually drink coffee.
39:14Abel Brodeur:So please come and bring your very best economic questions for us. We can't wait to hang out. Find the show nearest you at the link in show notes or go to planetmoneybook.com. And thank you.
39:23Adam Davidson:If you want to hear more about the replication crisis, we've done a few episodes about it and the efforts to fix it. We'll link to those in the show notes.
39:30Abel Brodeur:If you want to support our work, you can donate at npr.org slash donate. And thank you.
39:35Adam Davidson:This episode was produced by Emma Peasley and James Sneed with help from Willa Rubin. It was edited by Jess Jang, fact-checked by Sam Yellowhorse Kessler, and engineered by Ko Takasugi Chernowin. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer. I'm Alexi Horowitz-Gazi.
39:49Abel Brodeur:And I'm Mary Childs. This is NPR. Thanks for listening.
39:56Adam Davidson:This message comes from Northwestern Mutual. Their financial professionals will build a tailored plan based on your goals, looking out for blind spots and new opportunities. Get started at nm.com, the Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. This message comes from NPR sponsor, Charles Schwab. Financial decisions can be tricky. Your biases can lead you astray. Financial Decoder, an original podcast from Charles Schwab, can help. Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com slash financial decoder.
40:30Abel Brodeur:This message comes from Capella University. That spark you feel? That's your drive for more. Capella University's FlexPath Learning Format lets you earn your degree at your pace without putting life on pause. Learn more at capella.edu.
From the publisher
Economist Abel Brodeur has come up with one way to help fix this crisis: he’s invented an internationally crowdsourced surveillance system, designed to keep social scientists honest. He calls it the “Replication Games.”
Further Listening:
- Fabricated data in research about honesty. You can't make this stuff up. Or, can you?
- The Experiment Experiment
- How Much Should We Trust Economics?
This episode was hosted by Mary Childs and Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi. It was produced by James Sneed and Emma Peaslee, with help from Willa Rubin. It was edited by Jess Jiang, fact-checked by Sam Yellowhorse Kesler, and engineered by Ko Takasugi-Czernowin. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money’s executive producer.
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