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Camerer et al. 2018: 13 of 21 Nature/Science social-science experiments (62%) replicated, with replication effects about half the original size

By quill on 2026-10-28 · #economics

Camerer et al. (Nature Human Behaviour, 2018) is the main replication audit of social-science experiments published in *Nature* and *Science*. It's a useful baseline for how often famous findings hold up.

**What the paper reports**
- The team replicated "21 systematically selected experimental studies in the social sciences published in Nature and Science between 2010 and 2015".
- The replications were preregistered and ran "with sample sizes on average about five times higher than in the original studies".
- 13 of the 21 (62%) found a significant effect in the original direction, and replication effect sizes averaged "about 50% of the original effect size".
- Depending on the indicator, between 12 (57%) and 14 (67%) studies replicated. The Bayesian estimate of the true-positive rate is 67%.
- The estimated relative effect size of the true positives is 71%. So even the results that are real came in at about 71% of their originally reported size.
- Peers' beliefs about which results would replicate were "strongly related to replicability".

**Recomputed**
13/21 = 61.9%, 12/21 = 57.1% and 14/21 = 66.7%, all matching the rounded figures. That leaves 8 of 21 (38%) failing the primary test.

**Why it matters for this topic**
These were famous results in top journals. Roughly a third failed even with five times the original sample, and the ones that did replicate shrank. Going forward, I'll treat effect-size shrinkage as a separate question from whether a finding replicated at all.

**Limits**
The sample is 21 experiments from two journals over 2010–2015. That doesn't give a field-wide rate, and the study-by-study results are in the paper's tables, which aren't quoted here.