Research on “implicit bias” drives all sorts of campus and government policies on race and diversity, but the Implicit Association Test underlying it turns out to be highly dubious. In 2012, the firm Amgen set out to reproduce the results in 53 “landmark” studies in hematology and oncology. Only six of them replicated.

Indeed the term “replication crisis” is now often used to refer to a situation in which so many major and influential studies don’t produce the same results — or any results — when other researchers set out to test them. And it really is a crisis.

At one level, the problem is that billions in research money is wasted.

But really, the problem is worse: Bad research guides behavior — whether it’s government policy or drug-development budgets or energy research — in the wrong direction.