Replications are informative, particularly when they fail

Our comment on Archer’s enticing article focuses on his extension of Bhaskar’s philosophy to psychology, and on direct replication, which the author says is of very limited use in psychology. We only deal with critical realism indirectly. Our arguments boil down to two points: experiments can usefully be seen as performative (and the same goes for research in general), and replication is not problematic in psychology because of the variability of results, but useful for precisely that reason. Replication studies may even inspire psychologists to accept a wider range of epistemic approaches, although there are reasons to be pessimistic about the likelihood of fundamental change in the discipline.