“We all have our philosophies, whether or not we are aware of this fact, and our philosophies are not worth very much. But the impact of our philosophies upon our actions and our lives is often devastating.” Karl Popper, Objective knowledge (1972)
This opinion piece was inspired by our two-weekly Journal Club on the topics of the ‘researcher’s degrees of freedom’ (see Simmons, J. P., Nelson, L. D., & Simonsohn, U. (2011). False-positive psychology: Undisclosed flexibility in data collection and analysis allows presenting anything as significant. Psychological science, 22(11), 1359-1366.) and the replication crisis in psychology (see Open Science Collaboration. (2015). Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science. Science, 349(6251).). It narrates a personal reflection of Katrien, a last-year psychology student, on the matter of how our philosophies shape our (scientific) world.
Continue reading