The Psychological Science Accelerator's COVID-19 rapid-response dataset

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Psychological Science Accelerator coordinated three large-scale psychological studies to examine the effects of loss-gain framing, cognitive reappraisals, and autonomy framing manipulations on behavioral intentions and affective measures. The data collected (April to October 2020) included specific measures for each experimental study, a general questionnaire examining health prevention behaviors and COVID-19 experience, geographical and cultural context characterization, and demographic information for each participant. Each participant started the study with the same general questions and then was randomized to complete either one longer experiment or two shorter experiments. Data were provided by 73,223 participants with varying completion rates. Participants completed the survey from 111 geopolitical regions in 44 unique languages/dialects. The anonymized dataset described here is provided in both raw and processed formats to facilitate re-use and further analyses. The dataset offers secondary analytic opportunities to explore coping, framing, and self-determination across a diverse, global sample obtained at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, which can be merged with other time-sampled or geographic data.

Many Labs 4: Failure to Replicate Mortality Salience Effect With and Without Original Author Involvement

Interpreting a failure to replicate is complicated by the fact that the failure could be due to the original finding being a false positive, unrecognized moderating influences between the original and replication procedures, or faulty implementation of the procedures in the replication. One strategy to maximize replication quality is involving the original authors in study design. We (N = 17 Labs and N = 1,550 participants, after exclusions) experimentally tested whether original author involvement improved replicability of a classic finding from Terror Management Theory (Greenberg et al., 1994). Our results were non-diagnostic of whether original author involvement improves replicability because we were unable to replicate the finding under any conditions. This suggests that the original finding was either a false positive or the conditions necessary to obtain it are not fully understood or no longer exist. Data, materials, analysis code, preregistration, and supplementary documents can be found on the OSF page: https://osf.io/8ccnw/

A multi-country test of brief reappraisal interventions on emotions during the COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has increased negative emotions and decreased positive emotions globally. Left unchecked, these emotional changes might have a wide array of adverse impacts. To reduce negative emotions and increase positive emotions, we tested the effectiveness of reappraisal, an emotion-regulation strategy that modifies how one thinks about a situation. Participants from 87 countries and regions (n = 21,644) were randomly assigned to one of two brief reappraisal interventions (reconstrual or repurposing) or one of two control conditions (active or passive). Results revealed that both reappraisal interventions (vesus both control conditions) consistently reduced negative emotions and increased positive emotions across different measures. Reconstrual and repurposing interventions had similar effects. Importantly, planned exploratory analyses indicated that reappraisal interventions did not reduce intentions to practice preventive health behaviours. The findings demonstrate the viability of creating scalable, low-cost interventions for use around the world. PROTOCOL REGISTRATION: The stage 1 protocol for this Registered Report was accepted in principle on 12 May 2020. The protocol, as accepted by the journal, can be found at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.c.4878591.v1.

A Multi-Site Collaborative Study of the Hostile Priming Effect

In a now-classic study by Srull and Wyer (1979), people who were exposed to phrases with hostile content subsequently judged a man as being more hostile. And this “hostile priming effect” has had a significant influence on the field of social cognition over the subsequent decades. However, a recent multi-lab collaborative study (McCarthy et al., 2018) that closely followed the methods described by Srull and Wyer (1979) found a hostile priming effect that was nearly zero, which casts doubt on whether these methods reliably produce an effect. To address some limitations with McCarthy et al. (2018), the current multi-site collaborative study included data collected from 29 labs. Each lab conducted a close replication (total N = 2,123) and a conceptual replication (total N = 2,579) of Srull and Wyer’s methods. The hostile priming effect for both the close replication (d = 0.09, 95% CI [-0.04, 0.22], z = 1.34, p = .16) and the conceptual replication (d = 0.05, 95% CI [-0.04, 0.15], z = 1.15, p = .58) were not significantly different from zero and, if the true effects are non-zero, were smaller than what most labs could feasibly and routinely detect. Despite our best efforts to produce favorable conditions for the effect to emerge, we did not detect a hostile priming effect. We suggest that researchers should not invest more resources into trying to detect a hostile priming effect using methods like those described in Srull and Wyer (1979).

Many Labs 5: Registered Replication of Payne, Burkley, and Stokes (2008), Study 4

To rule out an alternative to their structural-fit hypothesis, Payne, Burkley, and Stokes (2008) demonstrated that correlations between implicit and explicit race attitudes were weaker when participants were put under high pressure to respond without bias than when they were placed under low pressure. This effect was replicated in Italy by Vianello (2015), although the replication effect was smaller than the original effect. In the current investigation, we examined the possibility that the source of a study’s sample moderates this effect. Teams from eight universities, four in the United States and four in Italy, replicated the original study (replication N = 1,103). Although we did detect moderation by the sample’s country, it was due to a reversal of the original effect in the United States and a lack of the original effect in Italy. We discuss this curious finding and possible explanations.

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

Replication studies in psychological science sometimes fail to reproduce prior findings. If these studies use methods that are unfaithful to the original study or ineffective in eliciting the phenomenon of interest, then a failure to replicate may be a failure of the protocol rather than a challenge to the original finding. Formal pre-data-collection peer review by experts may address shortcomings and increase replicability rates. We selected 10 replication studies from the Reproducibility Project: Psychology (RP:P; Open Science Collaboration, 2015) for which the original authors had expressed concerns about the replication designs before data collection; only one of these studies had yielded a statistically significant effect ( p < .05). Commenters suggested that lack of adherence to expert review and low-powered tests were the reasons that most of these RP:P studies failed to replicate the original effects. We revised the replication protocols and received formal peer review prior to conducting new replication studies. We administered the RP:P and revised protocols in multiple laboratories (median number of laboratories per original study = 6.5, range = 3–9; median total sample = 1,279.5, range = 276–3,512) for high-powered tests of each original finding with both protocols. Overall, following the preregistered analysis plan, we found that the revised protocols produced effect sizes similar to those of the RP:P protocols (Δ r = .002 or .014, depending on analytic approach). The median effect size for the revised protocols ( r = .05) was similar to that of the RP:P protocols ( r = .04) and the original RP:P replications ( r = .11), and smaller than that of the original studies ( r = .37). Analysis of the cumulative evidence across the original studies and the corresponding three replication attempts provided very precise estimates of the 10 tested effects and indicated that their effect sizes (median r = .07, range = .00–.15) were 78% smaller, on average, than the original effect sizes (median r = .37, range = .19–.50).

Many Labs 2: Investigating Variation in Replicability Across Samples and Settings

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.

Investigating Variation in Replicability

Although replication is a central tenet of science, direct replications are rare in psychology. This research tested variation in the replicability of 13 classic and contemporary effects across 36 independent samples totaling 6,344 participants. In the aggregate, 10 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 US 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.

Commentaries and Rejoinder on

While direct replications such as the “Many Labs” project are extremely valuable in testing the reliability of published findings across laboratories, they reflect the common reliance in psychology on single vignettes or stimuli, which limits the scope of the conclusions that can be reached. New experimental tools and statistical techniques make it easier to routinely sample stimuli, and to appropriately treat them as random factors. We encourage researchers to get into the habit of including multiple versions of the content (e.g., stimuli or vignettes) in their designs, to increase confidence in cross-stimulus generalization and to yield more realistic estimates of effect size. We call on editors to be aware of the challenges inherent in such stimulus sampling, to expect and tolerate unexplained variability in observed effect size between stimuli, and to encourage stimulus sampling instead of the deceptively cleaner picture offered by the current reliance on single stimuli.

Putting like a pro: the role of positive contagion in golf performance and perception

Many amateur athletes believe that using a professional athlete's equipment can improve their performance. Such equipment can be said to be affected with positive contagion, which refers to the belief of transference of beneficial properties between animate persons/objects to previously neutral objects. In this experiment, positive contagion was induced by telling participants in one group that a putter previously belonged to a professional golfer. The effect of positive contagion was examined for perception and performance in a golf putting task. Individuals who believed they were using the professional golfer's putter perceived the size of the golf hole to be larger than golfers without such a belief and also had better performance, sinking more putts. These results provide empirical support for anecdotes, which allege that using objects with positive contagion can improve performance, and further suggest perception can be modulated by positive contagion.

Cognitive “Category-Based Induction” Research and Social “Persuasion” Research Are Each About What Makes Arguments Believable

Social and cognitive psychologists each study factors that influence the believability of arguments, but they have worked mostly in parallel. We briefly examine and compare the dominant theories explaining argument believability in the social persuasion literature and the cognitive category-based induction literature. Although the two areas ask similar questions, they use different paradigms to study different aspects of the issues. We describe each area’s major paradigms and questions and then examine the conclusions that each area draws regarding the role of five variables important to argument believability: (a) the number of sources/premises, (b) the similarity between sources/premises, (c) individual differences in characteristics of the reasoner, (d) the available resources, and (e) the reasoner’s background knowledge and beliefs. Comparing the two literatures provides a more complete picture of the factors influencing argument believability and provides fruitful new avenues for integration and exploration.

The Surprisingly Limited Malleability of Implicit Racial Evaluations

Implicit preferences for Whites compared to Blacks can be reduced via exposure to admired Black and disliked White individuals ( Dasgupta & Greenwald, 2001 ). In four studies (total N = 4,628), while attempting to clarify the mechanism, we found that implicit preferences for Whites were weaker in the “positive Blacks” exposure condition compared to a control condition (weighted average d = .08). This effect was substantially smaller than the original demonstration ( Dasgupta & Greenwald, 2001 ; d = .82). Factors beyond exposure to admired Blacks may be necessary for the effect, such as making race accessible during exemplar exposure and including negative White exemplars. Our evidence suggests that exposure to known-group members shifts implicit race bias reliably, but weakly.