Turning the hands of time again: a purely confirmatory replication study and a Bayesian analysis

Abstract

In a series of four experiments, Topolinski and Sparenberg (2012) found support for the conjecture that clockwise movements induce psychological states of temporal progression and an orientation toward the future and novelty. Here we report the results of a preregistered replication attempt of Experiment 2 from Topolinski and Sparenberg (2012). Participants turned kitchen rolls either clockwise or counterclockwise while answering items from a questionnaire assessing openness to experience. Data from 102 participants showed that the effect went slightly in the direction opposite to that predicted by Topolinski and Sparenberg (2012), and a preregistered Bayes factor hypothesis test revealed that the data were 10.76 times more likely under the null hypothesis than under the alternative hypothesis. Our findings illustrate the theoretical importance and practical advantages of preregistered Bayes factor replication studies, both for psychological science and for empirical work in general.

Alcohol Expectancies Moderate the Association Between School Connectedness and Alcohol Consumption

“…To assess the trustworthiness of the findings, the initial results were tested on a separate set of observations, obtained from a different cohort of students. Three statistical approaches for assessing replication of previous findings used in the study were aligned with approaches presented by Wagenmakers et al For the primary preplanned analyses, we found that the patterns of significance in the models were the same, parameters were similar, and the probability that the 2009 patterns replicate the 2015 parameter estimates was high. The consistency in these characteristics greatly strengthens our conclusions, although replication by others would be beneficial and help rule out unrecognized methodological errors …”

Low replicability can support robust and efficient science

“…Exploration of various options may eventually reveal that turning a crank clockwise rather than anticlockwise primes people's openness to experience 22 . Discovery-oriented research is particularly vulnerable to producing nonreplicable results 23 because it relies on few constraints from theory or previous findings to select hypotheses for testing 24 . Moreover, because these hypotheses target eye-catching and counterintuitive findings that are a priori unexpected 24 , the chance of testing a true hypothesis is low.…”

Differences in basic digital competences between male and female university students of Social Sciences in Spain

“…In contrast, the calculation of the Bayes factors means taking into account possible prior information on the potential values that the size of the effect can have. In this case, we used a Cauchy distribution as prior distribution, with an r = 1 parameter (Rouder et al, 2009;Rouder & Morey, 2012;Wagenmakers et al, 2015), which is similar to a normal distribution but with added uncertainty in the tails of the distribution (a greater width of distribution). The r parameter accurately regulates this distribution width.…”