Want to scare the behavioral social scientists in your neighborhood out of their wits this Halloween? Have your kiddos wear some kind of box made to look like a super-computer, or dress them up like white-coated scientists with clipboards, but either way, prominently festoon their costume with the label “REPRODUCIBILITY PROJECT.”

Over at The Weekly Standard, Andrew Ferguson’s essay “Making It All Up” illustrates why no two words contain greater terror for our behavioral social scientists, and for their journalist enablers:

​Over 270 researchers, working as the Reproducibility Project, had gathered 100 studies from three of the most prestigious journals in the field of social psychology. Then they set about to redo the experiments and see if they could get the same results. Mostly they used the materials and methods the original researchers had used. Direct replications are seldom attempted in the social sciences, even though the ability to repeat an experiment and get the same findings is supposed to be a cornerstone of scientific knowledge. It’s the way to separate real information from flukes and anomalies.
These 100 studies had cleared the highest hurdles that social science puts up. They had been edited, revised, reviewed by panels of peers, revised again, published, widely read, and taken by other social scientists as the starting point for further experiments. Except . . .
The researchers, [the reporter] Vedantam glumly told his NPR audience, “found something very disappointing. Nearly two-thirds of the experiments did not replicate, meaning that scientists repeated these studies but could not obtain the results that were found by the original research team.”

Nearly two-thirds! Even if you charitably assume for the moment that the results would be better for 100 studies in fields of behavioral science other than social psychology, you’re never going to listen to the news the same way once you read Ferguson’s essay.