Contact:  ulrich.schimmack@utoronto.ca

The R-Index blog was created by Ulrich Schimmack on December 1, 2014.
I am a professor at the University of Toronto Mississauga in Canada since 2000. My primary research areas are personality psychology and well-being science.  

The purpose of the R-Index blog is to increase the replicability of published results in psychological science and to alert consumers of psychological research about problems in published articles.

To evaluate the credibility or “incredibility” of published research, my colleagues and I developed several statistical tools such as the Incredibility Test (Schimmack, 2012); the Test of Insufficient Variance (Schimmack, 2014), and z-curve (Version 1.0; Brunner & Schimmack, 2020; Version 2.0, Bartos & Schimmack, 2021). 

I have used these tools to demonstrate that several claims in psychological articles are incredible (a.k.a., untrustworthy), starting with Bem’s (2011) outlandish claims of time-reversed causal pre-cognition (Schimmack, 2012). This article triggered a crisis of confidence in the credibility of psychology as a science. 

Over the past decade it has become clear that many other seemingly robust findings are also highly questionable. For example, I showed that many claims in Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman’s book “Thinking: Fast and Slow” are based on shaky foundations (Schimmack, 2020).  An entire book on unconscious priming effects, by John Bargh, also ignores replication failures and lacks credible evidence (Schimmack, 2017).  The hypothesis that willpower is fueled by blood glucose and easily depleted is also not supported by empirical evidence (Schimmack, 2016). In general, many claims in social psychology are questionable and require new evidence to be considered scientific (Schimmack, 2020).  

Each year I post new information about the replicability of research in 120 Psychology Journals (Schimmack, 2021).  I also started providing information about the replicability of individual researchers and provide guidelines how to evaluate their published findings (Schimmack, 2021). 

Replication is essential for an empirical science, but it is not sufficient. Psychology also has a validation crisis (Schimmack, 2021).  That is, measures are often used before it has been demonstrate how well they measure something. For example, psychologists have claimed that they can measure individuals’ unconscious evaluations, but there is no evidence that unconscious evaluations even exist (Schimmack, 2021a, 2021b). 

If you are interested in my story how I ended up becoming a meta-critic of psychological science, you can read it here (my journey).