While I definitely agree that one shouldn't be overly dismissive without reading the underlying paper, the abstract can actually be surprisingly predictive.

"Beyond statistical issues, it strikes me that several of the studies that didn’t replicate have another quality in common: newsworthiness. They reported cute, attention-grabbing, whoa-if-true results that conform to the biases of at least some parts of society. One purportedly showed that reading literary fiction improves our ability to understand other people’s beliefs and desires. Another said that thinking analytically weakens belief in religion. Yet another said that people who think about computers are worse at recalling old information—a phenomenon that the authors billed as “the Google effect.” All of these were widely covered in the media."

But we should be dismissive of any new results from psychology, it just doesn't have systems in place to validate claims. There is some cool stuff in psychology that has been replicated 20 times, across different cultures, and over time. But the chances of a headline psychology paper being true are, generously, 5%.

To be far to the authors, they are in a bit of a bind. In order to get their Phd, and progress in their academic career they have to do "original" research.

For psychology for the last 40 years, this means do stuff like this. Get cohorts together and test claims. When one is statistically significant, publish. They really didn't have much of a choice other than drop their career. They are probably nice people who just want to teach college classes. Misinforming people is an unintended side effect and more an indictment of academia than of them.

Also, in this case their findings aren't even counter intuitive or that surprising. They are just measuring something that most of use believe already (judging by the rest of these comment threads).

That doesn't mean their results are untrue. We just have to be careful not to overestimate the strength of this evidence.

Regarding the folks who are militantly ignorant about the science of soft science, alas I have to agree, they are a bit of a problem.

They need to hold themselves to more serious standards, this makes science itself look bad

The research journal have a similar policy.

For some reason people in the Internet don't like it, so a solution for a blog post is to show both graphs. One that starts at zero and other with the relevant section.

No one is actually replicating the mass of research, they are trying to replicate highly cited results. Of those its half.

The vast majority of social science research is unreplicable, primarily because it uses dramatically under-powered association modelling to make causal claims. It's dressed-up astrology.