t did not begin in 2011. Warnings about how psychology tested its claims go back at least to 1959; the crisis was the moment people checked. Dates are of publication. Numbers are as the authors gave them.

in the tour: the forking corridor has placards on a round earth and on forking paths ···

1959	Sterling counts the significance tests in four psychology journals and finds almost every published result rejects the null. Either the field is nearly always right, or the non-significant results are not being published.
1962	Cohen estimates the statistical power of studies in one leading journal: for effects of medium size, less than an even chance of detecting them. See statistical power.
1967	Meehl's paradox (Meehl, 1967): better measurement makes physics' tests harder and psychology's easier.
1978	Meehl on tabular asterisks: significance testing as one reason "soft" psychology advances slowly [paraphrase, not a quotation].
1979	Rosenthal names the file-drawer problem and asks how many unpublished nulls it would take to cancel a published effect.
1994	Cohen, "The earth is round (p < .05)": what a p-value does and does not tell you.
2005	Ioannidis argues from power, bias and prior odds that most published findings in many fields are likely false [paraphrase, not a quotation].
2011	Bem reports nine experiments supporting precognition in a top journal, using standard methods. Simmons, Nelson & Simonsohn show how flexible analysis can make almost anything significant (p-hacking).
2012	Begley & Ellis: scientists at the biotechnology company Amgen could confirm the findings of only 6 of 53 landmark cancer studies.
2013	Button and colleagues estimate the median power of neuroscience studies at around one in five. Chambers launches registered reports at the journal Cortex: review and acceptance before the data are in.
2014	Many Labs 1: thirteen effects tested in thirty-six samples; most replicated, a few clearly did not.
2015	The Open Science Collaboration repeats 100 studies from three psychology journals; about a third to a half of the results hold up, depending on the criterion, with effects about half as large.
2018	Camerer and colleagues replicate social-science experiments from Nature and Science: thirteen of twenty-one. Many Labs 2 tests twenty-eight effects across many countries. Nosek and colleagues make the case for preregistration.

Sources

1. Sterling (1959). Publication decisions and their possible effects on inferences drawn from tests of significance—or vice versa. Journal of the American Statistical Association. doi:10.1080/01621459.1959.10501497
2. Cohen (1962). The statistical power of abnormal-social psychological research: A review. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology. doi:10.1037/h0045186
3. Meehl (1967). Theory-Testing in Psychology and Physics: A Methodological Paradox. Philosophy of Science. doi:10.1086/288135
4. Meehl (1978). Theoretical risks and tabular asterisks: Sir Karl, Sir Ronald, and the slow progress of soft psychology. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology. doi:10.1037/0022-006x.46.4.806
5. Rosenthal (1979). The file drawer problem and tolerance for null results. Psychological Bulletin. doi:10.1037/0033-2909.86.3.638
6. Cohen (1994). The earth is round (p < .05). American Psychologist. doi:10.1037/0003-066x.49.12.997
7. Ioannidis (2005). Why Most Published Research Findings Are False. PLoS Medicine. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124
8. Bem (2011). Feeling the future: Experimental evidence for anomalous retroactive influences on cognition and affect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. doi:10.1037/a0021524
9. Simmons, Nelson & Simonsohn (2011). False-Positive Psychology. Psychological Science. doi:10.1177/0956797611417632
10. Begley & Ellis (2012). Raise standards for preclinical cancer research. Nature. doi:10.1038/483531a
11. Button et al. (2013). Power failure: why small sample size undermines the reliability of neuroscience. Nature Reviews Neuroscience. doi:10.1038/nrn3475
12. Chambers (2013). Registered reports: a new publishing initiative at Cortex. Cortex. doi:10.1016/j.cortex.2012.12.016
13. Klein et al. (2014). Investigating Variation in Replicability. Social Psychology. doi:10.1027/1864-9335/a000178
14. Open Science Collaboration (2015). Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science. Science. doi:10.1126/science.aac4716
15. Camerer et al. (2018). Evaluating the replicability of social science experiments in Nature and Science between 2010 and 2015. Nature Human Behaviour. doi:10.1038/s41562-018-0399-z
16. Klein et al. (2018). Many Labs 2: Investigating Variation in Replicability Across Samples and Settings. Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science. doi:10.1177/2515245918810225
17. Nosek et al. (2018). The preregistration revolution. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. doi:10.1073/pnas.1708274114

Try it yourself. [playful] Small toys on the toy shelf that show this in action:   • the Stroop box — name the ink, not the word   • the arrow lines — an illusion that knowing about does not switch off

see also