Although replication is a central tenet of science, direct replications are rare in psychology. This research tested variation in the replicability of thirteen classic and contemporary effects across 36 independent samples totaling 6,344 participants. In the aggregate, ten effects replicated consistently.One effect -imagined contact reducing prejudice -showed weak support for replicability. And two effects -flag priming influencing conservatism and currency priming influencing system justification -did not replicate. We compared whether the conditions such as lab versus online or U.S. versus international sample predicted effect magnitudes. By and large they did not. The results of this small sample of effects suggest that replicability is more dependent on the effect itself than on the sample and setting used to investigate the effect. Word Count = 121 words Many Labs 3 Investigating variation in replicability: A "Many Labs" Replication ProjectReplication is a central tenet of science; its purpose is to confirm the accuracy of empirical findings, clarify the conditions under which an effect can be observed, and estimate the true effect size (Brandt et al., 2013; Open Science Collaboration, 2012. Successful replication of an experiment requires the recreation of the essential conditions of the initial experiment. This is often easier said than done. There may be an enormous number of variables influencing experimental results, and yet only a few tested. In the behavioral sciences, many effects have been observed in one cultural context, but not observed in others. Likewise, individuals within the same society, or even the same individual at different times (Bodenhausen, 1990), may differ in ways that moderate any particular result.Direct replication is infrequent, resulting in a published literature that sustains spurious findings (Ioannidis, 2005) and a lack of identification of the eliciting conditions for an effect. While there are good epistemological reasons for assuming that observed phenomena generalize across individuals and contexts in the absence of contrary evidence, the failure to directly replicate findings is problematic for theoretical and practical reasons. Failure to identify moderators and boundary conditions of an effect may result in overly broad generalizations of true effects across situations (Cesario, 2013) or across individuals (Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010). Similarly, overgeneralization may lead observations made under laboratory observations to be inappropriately extended to ecological contexts that differ in important ways (Henry, MacLeod, Phillips, & Crawford, 2004). Practically, attempts to closely replicate research findings can reveal important differences in what is considered a direct replication (Schimdt, 2009), thus leading to refinements of the initial theory (e.g., Aronson, 1992, Greenwald et al., 1986. Close replication can also lead to Many Labs 4 the clarification of tacit methodological knowledge that is necessary to elicit the effect of interest (Collins,...

We conducted preregistered replications of 28 classic and contemporary published findings, with protocols that were peer reviewed in advance, to examine variation in effect magnitudes across samples and settings. Each protocol was administered to approximately half of 125 samples that comprised 15,305 participants from 36 countries and territories. Using the conventional criterion of statistical significance ( p < .05), we found that 15 (54%) of the replications provided evidence of a statistically significant effect in the same direction as the original finding. With a strict significance criterion ( p < .0001), 14 (50%) of the replications still provided such evidence, a reflection of the extremely high-powered design. Seven (25%) of the replications yielded effect sizes larger than the original ones, and 21 (75%) yielded effect sizes smaller than the original ones. The median comparable Cohen’s ds were 0.60 for the original findings and 0.15 for the replications. The effect sizes were small (< 0.20) in 16 of the replications (57%), and 9 effects (32%) were in the direction opposite the direction of the original effect. Across settings, the Q statistic indicated significant heterogeneity in 11 (39%) of the replication effects, and most of those were among the findings with the largest overall effect sizes; only 1 effect that was near zero in the aggregate showed significant heterogeneity according to this measure. Only 1 effect had a tau value greater than .20, an indication of moderate heterogeneity. Eight others had tau values near or slightly above .10, an indication of slight heterogeneity. Moderation tests indicated that very little heterogeneity was attributable to the order in which the tasks were performed or whether the tasks were administered in lab versus online. Exploratory comparisons revealed little heterogeneity between Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) cultures and less WEIRD cultures (i.e., cultures with relatively high and low WEIRDness scores, respectively). Cumulatively, variability in the observed effect sizes was attributable more to the effect being studied than to the sample or setting in which it was studied.

There is good reason to believe that gaze direction and facial displays of emotion share an information value as signals of approach or avoidance. The combination of these cues in the analysis of social communication, however, has been a virtually neglected area of inquiry. Two studies were conducted to test the prediction that direct gaze would facilitate the processing of facially communicated approach-oriented emotions (e.g., anger and joy), whereas averted gaze would facilitate the processing of facially communicated avoidance-oriented emotions (e.g., fear and sadness). The results of both studies confirmed the central hypothesis and suggest that gaze direction and facial expression are combined in the processing of emotionally relevant facial information.

Research has largely neglected the effects of gaze direction cues on the perception of facial expressions of emotion. It was hypothesized that when gaze direction matches the underlying behavioral intent (approach-avoidance) communicated by an emotional expression, the perception of that emotion would be enhanced (i.e., shared signal hypothesis). Specifically, the authors expected that (a) direct gaze would enhance the perception of approach-oriented emotions (anger and joy) and (b) averted eye gaze would enhance the perception of avoidance-oriented emotions (fear and sadness). Three studies supported this hypothesis. Study 1 examined emotional trait attributions made to neutral faces. Study 2 examined ratings of ambiguous facial blends of anger and fear. Study 3 examined the influence of gaze on the perception of highly prototypical expressions.

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The ability to infer others' thoughts, intentions, and feelings is regarded as uniquely human. Over the last few decades, this remarkable ability has captivated the attention of philosophers, primatologists, clinical and developmental psychologists, anthropologists, social psychologists, and cognitive neuroscientists. Most would agree that the capacity to reason about others' mental states is innately prepared, essential for successful human social interaction. Whether this ability is culturally tuned, however, remains entirely uncharted on both the behavioral and neural levels. Here we provide the first behavioral and neural evidence for an intracultural advantage (better performance for same- vs. other-culture) in mental state decoding in a sample of native Japanese and white American participants. We examined the neural correlates of this intracultural advantage using fMRI, revealing greater bilateral posterior superior temporal sulci recruitment during same- versus other-culture mental state decoding in both cultural groups. These findings offer preliminary support for cultural consistency in the neurological architecture subserving high-level mental state reasoning, as well as its differential recruitment based on cultural group membership.

Previous work has shown that individuals agree across cultures on the traits that they infer from faces. Previous work has also shown that inferences from faces can be predictive of important outcomes within cultures. The current research merges these two lines of work. In a series of cross-cultural studies, the authors asked American and Japanese participants to provide naïve inferences of traits from the faces of U.S. political candidates (Studies 1 and 3) and Japanese political candidates (Studies 2 and 4). Perceivers showed high agreement in their ratings of the faces, regardless of culture, and both sets of judgments were predictive of an important ecological outcome (the percentage of votes that each candidate received in the actual election). The traits predicting electoral success differed, however, depending on the targets' culture. Thus, when American and Japanese participants were asked to provide explicit inferences of how likely each candidate would be to win an election (Studies 3-4), judgments were predictive only for same-culture candidates. Attempts to infer the electoral success for the foreign culture showed evidence of self-projection. Therefore, perceivers can reliably infer predictive information from faces but require knowledge about the target's culture to make these predictions accurately.

The origins of the appearances of anger and fear facial expressions are not well understood. The authors tested the hypothesis that such origins might lie in the expressions' resemblance to, respectively, mature and babyish faces in three studies. In Study 1, faces expressing anger and fear were judged to physically resemble mature and babyish faces. Study 2 indicated that characteristics associated specifically with babyishness are attributed to persons showing fear, whereas characteristics associated with maturity are attributed to persons showing anger. In Study 3, composite faces were used to minimize the possibility that the attributions were based on associations to the anger and fear emotions alone rather than to the physical resemblance of the expressions to static facial appearance cues. These results suggest that fear and anger expressions may serve socially adaptive purposes for those who show them, similar to the social adaptations associated with a babyish or mature facial appearance.