Jelte Wicherts
Jelte Wicherts is a methodologist at Tilburg University and the third author of the 2015 Cyberball meta-analysis. His own field is the reliability of psychological research itself: data sharing, statistical reporting errors, and the practices that determine whether a published finding means what it appears to mean. His name on a meta-analysis is a quality signal in its own right.
Who they are
Jelte Wicherts is full professor of methodology and chair of the Department of Methodology and Statistics at the Tilburg School of Social and Behavioral Sciences. His research covers reproducibility, biases in research, measurement invariance, group differences in IQ, the Flynn effect, structural equation modelling, errors in reported statistics, and data sharing. The unifying question is where the weak points in scientific practice are, and what would strengthen them.
He is one of the people who built the tools that catch bad statistical reporting. The 2016 statcheck paper, on which he is senior author, checked more than 250,000 p-values reported in eight psychology journals between 1985 and 2013 and found that roughly half of published empirical articles contained at least one inconsistent p-value, with around one in eight containing an inconsistency large enough to make a non-significant result appear significant or the reverse. His work on data sharing concerns how readily authors of published psychology papers will produce their data on request, and what that predicts.
On the 2015 meta-analysis of Cyberball studies he is third author, with Chris Hartgerink first. The relevance of his presence is straightforward. A large effect size reported by a team that includes one of the discipline's most persistent auditors of statistical practice is a different object from a large effect size reported without one.
Key papers
Hartgerink, C. H. J., van Beest, I., Wicherts, J. M., & Williams, K. D. (2015), "The Ordinal Effects of Ostracism: A Meta-Analysis of 120 Cyberball Studies," PLOS ONE, 10(5), e0127002. Third author.
Nuijten, M. B., Hartgerink, C. H. J., van Assen, M. A. L. M., Epskamp, S., & Wicherts, J. M. (2016), "The Prevalence of Statistical Reporting Errors in Psychology (1985-2013)," Behavior Research Methods, 48(4), 1205-1226. The statcheck paper.
Key ideas
Statistical reporting errors in psychology are common enough to be a property of the literature rather than an occasional lapse.
Whether authors will share their data on request is informative about the paper before anyone looks at the data.
Who is on a research team is evidence about the result, not only about the credit.
Concepts on this site
Find them elsewhere
His own site links both the X account and the Scholar profile, and that Scholar profile is verified at uvt.nl with a Tilburg affiliation. No Bluesky or LinkedIn confirmed
Checked 2026-09-10. Handles and affiliations go out of date, so treat this block as a snapshot rather than a standing fact.
Sources
- Hartgerink, C. H. J., van Beest, I., Wicherts, J. M., & Williams, K. D. (2015), "The Ordinal Effects of Ostracism: A Meta-Analysis of 120 Cyberball Studies," PLOS ONE, 10(5), e0127002.
- Nuijten, M. B., Hartgerink, C. H. J., van Assen, M. A. L. M., Epskamp, S., & Wicherts, J. M. (2016), "The Prevalence of Statistical Reporting Errors in Psychology (1985-2013)," Behavior Research Methods, 48(4), 1205-1226.
- Tilburg University, staff record. (Title, chair of the Department of Methodology and Statistics, research interests.)