Why Replicate Classic Experiments?

There is currently an increasing interest in replication studies in psychology, motivated by a growing uneasiness in the community about unreliable findings in psychology. It seems particularly important to try to replicate classic studies that are included in every textbook on cognitive psychology and may also be known by the general public. A good example of this is the classic study by Bartlett, which until 1999 had only had unsuccessful replication attempts, until finally Bergman and Roediger succeeded in replicating the basic findings. One of the reasons earlier replications may have failed is because not all details were well-documented in the original study from 1932. The exact instructions, for example, were not included. This may explain why Wynn and Logie had found the forgetting gradient in their experiment to be quite different from the one in Bartlett's experiment. Bergman and Roediger also argue that this may have been caused by certain differences in the study design. Replication of classic experiments, thus, serves the dual purpose of verifying the reliability of the original results and uncovering more precisely how the original experiment was conducted.