How the Complexity of Psychological Processes Reframes the Issue of Reproducibility in Psychological Science

In the past decade, various recommendations have been published to enhance the methodological rigor and publication standards in psychological science. However, adhering to these recommendations may have limited impact on the reproducibility of causal effects, as long as psychological phenomena continue to be viewed as decomposable into separate and additive statistical structures of causal relationships. In this paper, we show that (a) psychological phenomena are patterns emerging from non-decomposable and non-isolable complex processes that obey idiosyncratic nonlinear dynamics; (b) these processual features jeopardize the chances of standard reproducibility of statistical results; and (c) these features call on researchers to reconsider what can and should be reproduced, namely the psychological processes per se, and the signatures of their complexity and dynamics. Accordingly, we argue for a greater consideration of process causality of psychological phenomena reflected by key properties of complex dynamical systems (CDSs). This implies developing and testing formal models of psychological dynamics, which can be implemented by computer simulation. The scope of the CDS paradigm and its convergences with other paradigms are finally discussed regarding the reproducibility issue. Ironically, the CDS approach could account for both reproducibility and non-reproducibility of the statistical effects usually sought in mainstream psychological science.