What single imporvement do you think would be necessary to increase the reliability

If you mean reliability for say an experiment.

1. Detailed procedure of the experiment should be published. How many samples were tested? List of the equipment that were used and justified explanations of the process. These are important in order to prevent things like conspiracy or oversimplified test (only using a small number of sample).

2. Experiment should be done not only by one particular expert, but lots.

If for example, Professor ‘A’ makes the hypothesis, he should not be the only one who does the experiment. Even if he has hundreds of assistant, it may not be fair, as bias may play a significant role. In order to reduce a factor called bias, other expert (with at least the same qualification) should take part in the experiment.

3. A wide variety of ‘sample’ (in psychology would mostly be animal, or human in some case) must be tested. It is important to remember that each person is unique while the world consists of 6 billion people. Therefore by testing a group from the same place or background might not be enough. Things like culture/background, physical condition or surroundings need to be put into consideration.

These 3 factors are very important in order for the word ‘reliability’ to be awarded. They will also be beneficial in terms of keeping us from having any knowledge that may lead us astray. Remember that knowledge comes from a hypothesis, and for a hypothesis to be approved; it needs to be tested first by experiments. Those 3 factors would be needed to increase reliability.