Challenging Racism Project Seminar Series: Questioning Some Metascience Assumptions with Professor Mark Rubin

Metascience uses a scientific approach to understand and improve the scientific approach! In this presentation, I question some mainstream assumptions in contemporary metascience. Examples include: (1) exploratory research is more “tentative” than confirmatory research; (2) questionable research practices like HARKing are bad; (3) researcher bias is bad; (4) undisclosed multiple testing is bad; and (5) publication bias is bad. I discuss these and other metascience assumptions and argue that may not be as problematic as assumed.

Mark Rubin is a professor of psychology at Durham University, UK. He has published several articles on issues connected with the replication crisis in science. In particular, he has argued that it’s not always problematic to engage in questionable research practices such as hypothesising after the results are known and undisclosed multiple testing. He has also criticised some science reforms, such as preregistration and stricter adherence to Neyman-Pearson hypothesis testing. Nonetheless, he is generally in favour of other open science reforms, such as open access preprints and open data and materials in postpositivist science.