Atlas Trail
Findings Psychology Had to Walk Back
From a hospital ward to a rat cage to a brain diagram everyone has seen: this trail follows famous psychology findings whose own methods, replications or later scrutiny forced the field to say less than it first claimed, ending at the replication crisis that gave the whole pattern a name.
Stop 1 of 8.
Studies and Experiments
The Rosenhan experiment: staff at twelve hospitals never spotted the healthy pseudopatients, a finding later investigation found may itself have been distorted.
Stop 2 of 8.
Studies and Experiments
Rat Park: an enriched environment cut morphine consumption dramatically, though a 1996 replication attempt could not reproduce it.
Stop 3 of 8.
Theories and Concepts
Multiple intelligences: hugely influential in classrooms, and acknowledged by its own author to lack the validating evidence a scientific model needs.
Stop 4 of 8.
Theories and Concepts
The triune brain: a three-layer model of brain evolution, popular for decades, now regarded by comparative neuroscientists as a myth.
Stop 5 of 8.
Studies and Experiments
Facilitated communication: more than fifty controlled studies found the facilitator, not the non-verbal person, was the actual source of the typed messages.
Stop 6 of 8.
Studies and Experiments
The Implicit Association Test: widely used, and still disputed on how reliable its scores are and how much they predict real behavior.
Stop 7 of 8.
Theories and Concepts
Stereotype threat: one of social psychology's most cited findings, and one whose original effect size a 2019 meta-analysis found may have been inflated by publication bias.
Stop 8 of 8.
Theories and Concepts
The replication crisis: the field's own name for the pattern every stop on this trail is an example of.
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