As standards for designing and evaluating psychological research have grown much more rigorous in the last fifteen years, owing largely to a seminal paper by Joseph Simmons, Leif Nelson, and Uri Simonsohn, something has been bothering me. Will the new standards for psychological research affect the questions psychologists ask and the topics they explore, and not just in a good way? Research has gotten much tighter methodologically. We should have greater confidence than before that findings we read about in journals will replicate. What’s good about this is evident. But do we pay a price for increased rigor? If so, what is the price? And is it a price worth paying?

To begin to address these questions, I want to insert you into a hypothetical experiment. Imagine yourself a participant in a psychological study of basic sensory sensitivity. The research aims to determine what are the weakest sounds that you can reliably detect. You are seated in a soundproof chamber, with headphones on. Periodically, a warning light appears, after which you experience a trial that either contains a sound or does not. Your job is simply to hit “Y” on your keyboard (for “yes, I heard a sound”) or “N” (for “no, I didn’t hear a sound”). Because there is “noise” in the system (e.g., your attention may wander), you go through hundreds of trials like this, and by convention, your “threshold” for detecting weak auditory inputs is defined as the sound intensity that you correctly detect 50 percent of...

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