Many Labs 5: Registered Replication of Förster, Liberman, and Kuschel’s (2008) Study 1

Abstract

In a test of their global-/local-processing-style model, Förster, Liberman, and Kuschel (2008) found that people assimilate a primed concept (e.g., “aggressive”) into their social judgments after a global prime (e.g., they rate a person as being more aggressive than do people in a no-prime condition) but contrast their judgment away from the primed concept after a local prime (e.g., they rate the person as being less aggressive than do people in a no prime-condition). This effect was not replicated by Reinhard (2015) in the Reproducibility Project: Psychology. However, the authors of the original study noted that the replication could not provide a test of the moderation effect because priming did not occur. They suggested that the primes might have been insufficiently applicable and the scenarios insufficiently ambiguous to produce priming. In the current replication project, we used both Reinhard’s protocol and a revised protocol that was designed to increase the likelihood of priming, to test the original authors’ suggested explanation for why Reinhard did not observe the moderation effect. Teams from nine universities contributed to this project. We first conducted a pilot study ( N = 530) and successfully selected ambiguous scenarios for each site. We then pilot-tested the aggression prime at five different sites ( N = 363) and found that it did not successfully produce priming. In agreement with the first author of the original report, we replaced the prime with a task that successfully primed aggression (hostility) in a pilot study by McCarthy et al. (2018). In the final replication study ( N = 1,460), we did not find moderation by protocol type, and judgment patterns in both protocols were inconsistent with the effects observed in the original study. We discuss these findings and possible explanations.

Many Labs 5: Testing Pre-Data-Collection Peer Review as an Intervention to Increase Replicability

“…The two project organizers had primary responsibility for drafting the manuscript, and the other authors contributed to revisions, knowing the outcomes of at most one set of replications during the writing process (depending on which individual studies they helped conduct). The full reports of the individual replication studies are reported separately in this issue (Baranski et al, 2020; Buttrick et al, 2020; Chartier et al, 2020; Corker et al, 2020; Ebersole et al, 2020; IJzerman et al, 2020; Lazarević et al, 2020; Mathur et al, 2020; Rabagliati et al, 2020; Skorb et al, 2020).…”

A Review of Multisite Replication Projects in Social Psychology: Is It Viable to Sustain Any Confidence in Social Psychology’s Knowledge Base?

“…There were multiple clear instances of manipulation failure: Cheung et al (2016), Buttrick et al (2020), Ijzerman et al (2020), Hagger et al (2016), Corker et al (2020), and DeJong et al (2009). These six replications constitute 17% of the total sample.…”

No Correlation Between Mood or Motivation and the Processing of Global and Local Information

“…More specifically, the so-far strongest claim of a direct connection between mood and attention, the GLOMOsys model of Förster and Dannenberg (2010) , does not provide any mechanistic consideration regarding how such a connection might operate. Moreover, recent studies have raised doubts about the replicability of the empirical basis of GLOMOsys (e.g., Field et al, 2016 ; Ijzerman et al, 2020 ; Klauer & Singmann, 2015 ; Reinhard, 2015 ). A possible reason for the shaky empirical basis of mood effects on attention might be that important moderators of the effect have been neglected or not yet fully understood, thus rendering experimental manipulations of mood ineffective.…”