> The problem, it turned out, was not with Marcus Munafo's science, but with the way the scientific literature had been "tidied up" to present a much clearer, more robust outcome.

I've seen this time and time again while working in neuroscience and hearing the same from friends that are still in those fields.

Data is often thoroughly massaged, outliers left out of reporting and methods tuned to confirm, rather than falsify certain outcomes. It's very demotivating as a PhD student to see very significant results, but when you perform the same study, you don't find reality to be as black and white as published papers.

On this note, the majority of papers is still about reporting significant results, leading to several labs chasing dead ends, as none of them can publish "negative" results.