The Reliability Paradox Defining Reliability In 2017, Hedge, Powell, and Sumner (2017) conducted a study to determine the reliability of a variety of of behavioral tasks. Reliability has many different meanings throughout the psychological literature, but what Hedge et al. were interested in was how well a behavioral measure consistently ranks individuals. In other words, when I have people perform a task and then measure their performance, does the measure that I use to summarize their behavior show high test-retest reliability?