Advanced Social Psychology

Now what do I teach?' is a common refrain among social psychologists taken aback by recent failures to replicate some prominent and classic findings. Updating a social psychology textbook is an unenviable task at a time of substantial uncertainty about theories and findings that seemed almost ordinary in the last edition. Admirably, Editors Finkel and Baumeister aim to address reproducibility directly in this 2nd Edition of Advanced Social Psychology. The first three chapters discuss replicability challenges and reforms to improve rigor and credibility. They also set the stage that science does not have a canon of inarguable facts. Scientific understanding is always in revision, and every finding, claim, and theory is open to confrontation.
The other 18 substantive chapters approach replicability differently. Some highlight replicability success and challenges in their substantive domains; the chapters on Attraction, Morality, Health, and Computation stand out as effective examples. Others appear to address replicability implicitly by what is not said or cited. In those, the self-corrective process of science is working quietly by omission. Finally, a few chapters appear to have missed news of the "reproducibility crisis". These chapters treat each cited claim with the same enthusiastic certainty whether it is backed by a substantial body of evidence or a single paper with just significant effects. This diversity among contributed chapters reflects where we are today as a discipline * still wrestling, from many points of view, with the credibility of the rich theories and findings that comprise social psychology.Brian Nosek, Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Virginia *