“I could’ve told you that” might have a useful role to play in science

Last year, a huge group of researchers collaborated to try to replicate the results of some very famous social science research. They determined that only 62% of the studies found similar results when they were repeated. But the researchers found something else intriguing: other scientists were astonishingly good at guessing which of the results would replicate.

Does that mean we can just ask scientists for their hunch on what research is robust? It's a lot more complicated than that, but predictions could have a useful role to play in science, and new projects are springing up to make use of them.

Obvious or not?

The success of scientists' predictions doesn't mean that every individual scientist (or non-scientist) can just rely on their gut to guess which scientific results are true. We have a term for that: "confirmation bias." But that doesn't mean that scientists can't have informed, well-founded suspicions about some research. Predictions taken from across a whole group of scientists could average out the bias and highlight the well-informed doubts and thus be a very useful contribution to scientific research.

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