But he couldn’t find anything wrong with his research. “It was as if verbal overshadowing, my big new idea, was getting weaker.” At first, he assumed that he’d made an error in experimental design or a statistical miscalculation. “I’d often still see an effect, but the effect just wouldn’t be as strong,” he told me. In each instance, asking people to put their perceptions into words led to dramatic decreases in performance.īut while Schooler was publishing these results in highly reputable journals, a secret worry gnawed at him: it was proving difficult to replicate his earlier findings. Before long, Schooler had extended the model to a variety of other tasks, such as remembering the taste of a wine, identifying the best strawberry jam, and solving difficult creative puzzles. Since its initial publication, in 1990, it has been cited more than four hundred times. The study turned him into an academic star. Schooler called the phenomenon “verbal overshadowing.”
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But, in a series of clever experiments, Schooler demonstrated that subjects shown a face and asked to describe it were much less likely to recognize the face when shown it later than those who had simply looked at it. At the time, it was widely believed that the act of describing our memories improved them. Jonathan Schooler was a young graduate student at the University of Washington in the nineteen-eighties when he discovered a surprising new fact about language and memory. If replication is what separates the rigor of science from the squishiness of pseudoscience, where do we put all these rigorously validated findings that can no longer be proved? Which results should we believe? Francis Bacon, the early-modern philosopher and pioneer of the scientific method, once declared that experiments were essential, because they allowed us to “put nature to the question.” But it appears that nature often gives us different answers. In the field of medicine, the phenomenon seems extremely widespread, affecting not only antipsychotics but also therapies ranging from cardiac stents to Vitamin E and antidepressants: Davis has a forthcoming analysis demonstrating that the efficacy of antidepressants has gone down as much as threefold in recent decades.įor many scientists, the effect is especially troubling because of what it exposes about the scientific process. This phenomenon doesn’t yet have an official name, but it’s occurring across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology. It’s as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable. The premise of replicability is that the scientific community can correct for these flaws.īut now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain. Most of the time, scientists know what results they want, and that can influence the results they get. It’s a safeguard for the creep of subjectivity. Replicability is how the community enforces itself. The test of replicability, as it’s known, is the foundation of modern research. Different scientists in different labs need to repeat the protocols and publish their results. “In fact, sometimes they now look even worse,” John Davis, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago, told me.īefore the effectiveness of a drug can be confirmed, it must be tested and tested again. Many researchers began to argue that the expensive pharmaceuticals weren’t any better than first-generation antipsychotics, which have been in use since the fifties. A recent study showed an effect that was less than half of that documented in the first trials, in the early nineteen-nineties. Illustration by LAURENT CILLUFFOīut the data presented at the Brussels meeting made it clear that something strange was happening: the therapeutic power of the drugs appeared to be steadily waning. Many results that are rigorously proved and accepted start shrinking in later studies.
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