Marco Giancotti , August 21, 2025 Cover image: Photo by Rebecca Freeman, Unsplash
TL;DR is the part in bold below.
The field of psychology had a big crisis in the 2010s, when many widely accepted results turned out to be much less solid than previously thought. It's called the replication crisis, because labs around the world tried and failed to replicate, in new experiments, previous results published by their original "discoverers". In other words, many reported psychological effects were either non-existent—artifacts of the experimenter's flawed setup—or so much weaker than originally claimed that they lost most of their intellectual sparkle.
(The crisis spanned other fields as well, but I mostly care about psychology here, especially the cognitive kind.)
This is very old news, and I've been vaguely aware of several of the biggest disgraced results for years, but I keep on forgetting which are (still probably) real and which aren't. This is not good. Most results in the field do actually replicate and are robust[citation needed], so it would be a pity to lose confidence in the whole field just because of a few bad apples.
This post is a compact reference list of the most (in)famous cognitive science results that failed to replicate and should, for the time being, be considered false. The only goal is to offset the trust-undermining effects of my poor memory—and perhaps yours, too?—with a bookmarkable page.
This can't be a comprehensive list: if a study is not on this page, it's not guaranteed to be fully replicated. Still, this should cover most of the high-profile debunked theories that laypeople like me may have heard of.
Credit: I enlisted the help of Kimi K2, o3, and Sonnet 4 to gather and fact-check this list. I also checked, pruned, and de-hallucinated all the results.
Ego Depletion Effect
Claimed result: We have a "willpower battery" that gradually depletes during the day as we exercise self-control. (I remember reading Baumeister's pop-science book and being awed by the implications of their findings; I might have known it sounded too good to be true.)
... continue reading