These critiques have generated some bitterness. Nobody likes to be told that they’re doing things wrong and that their results can’t be trusted. (I’ve had studies of mine replicate and others fail to replicate—believe me, the former feels nicer.) There are legitimate complaints about the nasty and gleeful tone taken by some of the critics, particularly over social media—the phrase “replication bully” has recently been coined—and there are legitimate worries that certain individuals, and certain research programs, have been targeted for special scrutiny. But most of the criticisms are reasonable and persuasive.

It’s worth emphasizing that it’s not just our crisis. Similar issues arise in psychiatry, economics, particle physics, and, most of all, and medical research. It’s hard not to be shocked at the recent report in a Nature paper reporting a failure to replicate significant experiments in the domain of cancer research in 47 out of 53 cases. The special attention that psychology has received might not be because we are unusually bad scientists, but because we are reflective about our research, and devoted to cleaning up our act.

So there’s a crisis. But there are a few reasons why it’s not as bad as you might have heard.

For one thing, any psychologist can easily list mountains of findings that are rock-solid. There are basic discoveries about memory, language, perception, reasoning, development, social psychology, clinical psychology, neuroscience, and so on—findings that have been replicated countless times, that have led to rich theoretical advances and real practical improvements in people’s lives. And each day, new publications emerge that report robust and convincing findings that move the field forward. Things aren’t that bad.

And while I’m all in favor of replication, not every failure to replicate is a cause for hand-wringing. Even if an experiment is perfect, sometimes effects don’t show up due to random chance.

And often an experiment isn’t perfect. Most psychology research explores subtle theoretically-motivated predictions, typically looking for effects that can only arise in certain controlled environments. If the experiment isn’t carefully done, you won’t get the findings.

Here’s an example: It’s long been known that children can use the syntax of a word to guess at its meaning. If you show a 3-year-old a strange object and say “This is a dax”, she will think that the noun “dax” refers to the object; while if you say “This is a daxy one”, she will think that the adjective “daxy” refers to a property of the object, such as its color.

This is a robust finding, one that bears on theories of how children learn to talk. But it’s easy to fail to get this effect—just run your experiment badly. When saying the sentences, mumble, so that the children aren’t sure what you said. Loom over the children during the experiment, so that they are too frightened to pay attention. Test in a busy room so that the children are too distracted to focus.