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Robust scientific knowledge is contingent upon replication of original findings. However, replicating researchers are constrained by resources, and will almost always have to choose one replication effort to focus on from a set of potential candidates. To select a candidate efficiently in these cases, we need methods for deciding which out of all candidates considered would be the most useful to replicate, given some overall goal researchers wish to achieve. In this article we assume that the overall goal researchers wish to achieve is to maximize the utility gained by conducting the replication study. We then propose a general rule for study selection in replication research based on the replication value of the set of claims considered for replication. The replication value of a claim is defined as the maximum expected utility we could gain by conducting a replication of the claim, and is a function of (a) the value of being certain about the claim, and (b) uncertainty about the claim based on current evidence. We formalize this definition in terms of a causal decision model, utilizing concepts from decision theory and causal graph modeling. We discuss the validity of using replication value as a measure of expected utility gain, and we suggest approaches for deriving quantitative estimates of replication value. Our goal in this article is not to define concrete guidelines for study selection, but to provide the necessary theoretical foundations on which such concrete guidelines could be built.Translational Abstract Replication-redoing a study using the same procedures-is an important part of checking the robustness of claims in the psychological literature. The practice of replicating original studies has been woefully devalued for many years, but this is now changing. Recent calls for improving the quality of research in psychology has generated a surge of interest in funding, conducting, and publishing replication studies. Because many studies have never been replicated, and researchers have limited time and money to perform replication studies, researchers must decide which studies are the most important to replicate. This way scientists learn the most, given limited resources. In this article, we lay out what it means to think about what is the most important thing to replicate, and we propose a general decision rule for picking a study to replicate. That rule depends on a concept we call replication value. Replication value is a function of the importance of the study, and how uncertain we are about the findings. In this article we explain how researchers can think precisely about the value of replication studies. We then discuss when and how it makes sense to use replication value as a measure of how valuable a replication study would be, and we discuss factors that funders, journals, or scientists could consider when determining how valuable a replication study is.

We conducted focus groups with participants of a laboratory experiment on cheating with the aim to describe and structure participants’ lived experience with the experiment and to compare their per...

When it comes to the nature of the COVID-19 pandemic and the effectiveness of measures against the disease, many citizens worldwide do not trust their governments or health authorities. This brief essay discusses several psychological mechanisms which, under certain conditions, lead people to ignore important sources of information and hinder effective management of the epidemic. The paper shows that understanding psychological mechanisms, such as information neglect, cognitive dissonance, psychological reactance, and, in general, the diversity of people’s thinking styles, may help leaders design more effective government communications.

A pervading global narrative suggests that political polarisation is increasing in the US and around the world. Beliefs in increased polarisation impact individual and group behaviours regardless of whether they are accurate or not. One driver of polarisation are beliefs about how members of the out-group perceive us, known as group meta-perceptions. A 2020 study by Lees and Cikara in US samples suggests that not only are out-group meta-perceptions highly inaccurate, but informing people of this inaccuracy reduces negative beliefs about the out-group. Given the importance of these findings for understanding and mitigating polarisation, it is essential to test to what extent they generalise to other countries. We assess that generalisability by replicating two of the original experiments in 10,207 participants from 26 countries in the first experiment and 10 in the second. We do this by studying local group divisions, which we refer to as fault lines. In line with our hypotheses, results show that the pattern found in the US broadly generalises, with greater heterogeneity explained by specific policies rather than between-country differences. The replication of a simple disclosure intervention in the second experiment yielded a modest reduction in negative motive attributions to the out-group, similar to the original study. These findings indicate first that inaccurate and negative group meta-perceptions are exhibited in a large number of countries, not only the US, and that informing individuals of their misperceptions can yield positive benefits for intergroup relations. The generalisability of these findings highlights a robust phenomenon with major implications for political discourse worldwide.

Does the choice of an environment where cheating is possible lead to its escalation? We analyzed behavior of employees (N = 284) hired to perform a task online. In the manual reporting (MR), employees could overreport the number of hours worked. In the automatic reporting (AR), the hours were counted automatically, making cheating impossible. Two-thirds of the participants were given a chance to choose the reporting scheme, the rest were assigned to the MR directly. As the actual time spent on the task was tracked in all conditions, we were able to assess the degree of overreporting by employees in MR. Although we found that people in MR slightly overreported the hours worked, employees who chose MR did not overreport their hours more than those assigned to MR at random. Moreover, participants lower in honesty-humility were not more likely to choose MR; only those higher in emotionality were. The results show that even when enabled to cheat, online workers reported their hours worked honestly and the possibility for cheaters to select cheating enabling environments may not always lead to an increase of dishonesty in organizations.

When an opportunity to cheat is present, having a justification increases the chance that people will take it. We report a study where people made choices whether to cheat for their own or the charity’s benefit, without a cost to the other party or at its expense. Social and situational justifications were manipulated by varying the beneficiary of cheating and ambiguity of cheating to make it easier for people to cheat. We found that people cheated less in the trials where cheating for one beneficiary was at the expense of the other party. Using mouse-tracking data, we examined whether cheating was relatively deliberate or automatic. People hesitated more on trials where they were tempted to cheat, but there was no change in the initial direction of mouse movement on such trials. Our results suggest that cheating is not an automatic process, that justifications have a similar impact on cheating for oneself and others, and that people might be wary of cheating for one party at the expense of another.

The study measures how often customers are cheated in real-world transactions. In a pre-registered field study in Prague, Czech Republic, hired confederates posed as foreigners unfamiliar with local currency. While buying snacks in grocery stores (N = 259) either in the morning or in the evening, they provided cashiers with an opportunity to steal money from them by keeping more change than they were supposed to. The customers were cheated in 21% of stores, the median overcharge was 54% of the value of an average purchase, and overcharging occurred more often in the stores with on-line reviews mentioning dishonesty of employees. Although males cheated and were cheated slightly more often than females, gender differences were not significant. In contrast with predictions of the Morning Morality Effect, dishonest behavior occurs slightly more often in the morning than in the evening. The results show that cheating of customers in grocery stores is relatively widespread and it is especially prevalent in the central city district where the odds of being cheated are more than three times higher in comparison with the rest of the city.

The present study examined whether difficulty of recollection may influence the effectiveness of the “Three good things in life” exercise that has previously been shown to increase happiness. Participants were randomly assigned to write 1–10 good things that happened to them during the day in the course of two weeks. We measured life satisfaction, positive and negative affect before the exercise and three times after the exercise. We found no effect of the number of good things participants wrote each day. Life satisfaction and positive affect of participants did not increase after the two weeks of the exercise, but we found a reduction in negative affect. We further investigated various aspects of the exercise in exploratory analyses.

Laboratory studies allow studying the predictors of bribe-taking in a controlled setting. However, presently used laboratory tasks often lack any connection to norm violation or invite participants to role-play. A new experimental task for studying the decision to take a bribe was designed in this study to overcome these problems by embedding the opportunity for bribe-taking in an unrelated task that participants perform. Using this new experimental task, we found that refraining from harming a third party by taking a bribe was associated with lower offered bribes and higher scores of the participants on the honesty-humility scale from the HEXACO personality inventory. A trial-level analysis showed that response times were longer for trials with bribes and even longer for trials in which bribes were accepted. These results suggest that taking a bribe may require overcoming automatic honest response and support the validity of the honesty-humility scale in predicting moral behavior.

Euthanasia is a highly controversial topic. One of the arguments against legalisation of euthanasia is that it would lead to an attitudinal slippery slope effect; that is, a shift in attitudes toward euthanasia even toward cases which were not legalised. The present study tested a possible mechanism which may lead to such shift in two experiments. Participants judged morality of euthanasia in two hypothetical scenarios describing patients requesting euthanasia. We found that participants who first evaluated a case of a non-terminally ill patient suffering from fatigue afterward considered euthanasia for a terminally ill patient suffering from pain more morally right than participants who evaluated euthanasia in the latter case first. Furthermore, we found that presenting the case of the patient suffering from fatigue before asking about attitudes toward legality of euthanasia led participants to oppose it more. The study suggests that public’s expressed attitudes toward legality of euthanasia might be easily influenced by a choice of illustrative examples. However, the change in attitudes predicted by the slippery slope effect was not observed.

The target article is built on an analogy between humans and ultrasocial insects. We argue that there are many important limitations to the analogy that make any possible inferences from the analogy questionable. We demonstrate the issue using an example of the difference between a loss of autonomy in humans and in social insects.

In a recent Nature article, Cohn et al. (2014, henceforth CFM) boldly claim that their results “suggest that the prevailing business culture in the banking industry weakens and undermines the honesty norm” (p. 1). The main empirical finding of the CFM paper is that a group of bank employees that answered a series of questions about their work subsequently reported higher proportion of wins in a coin flipping task (58.2%) than a control group of bank employees (51.6%) that answered questions of a similar form but focused on their leisure activities instead of banking. Because one can on average correctly guess the outcome of only half of the flips, a higher rate of success reported by a group indicates that some of its members cheated. From this result the authors infer that asking bankers about their work makes their professional identity more salient, which leads them to cheat more. That in turn is supposed to suggest that “prevailing business culture in the banking industry favors dishonest behavior” (CFM, p. 3). We do not want to question the reality of their empirical findings. However, in line with previous critiques of priming research (Stafford, 2014), we want to point out certain limitations of the inferences which can be drawn from the empirical results: First, the observed dishonest behavior after the banking identity prime does not necessarily mean that there are social norms encouraging dishonesty in the banking industry. Instead of norms, a negative stereotype of bankers' dishonesty might be responsible for the observed effect: other stereotypes were shown to influence behavior—for example priming of the “hooligan” stereotype decreases performance in a trivia quiz (Dijksterhuis and van Knippenberg, 1998). Second, it is not even necessary that the observed difference in cheating had been caused by the priming of the professional identity. Either the other group could have been primed to cheat less, or other related concepts could have been primed in the experimental condition together with the banking identity and caused more cheating. Our goal is to highlight the fact that the study of cultural norms on behavior using indirect methods often precludes us from making strong conclusions, because alternative explanations are plentiful and hard to rule out. We offer suggestions how future studies can build on the CFM design and more reliably answer the question whether the social norm in banking really supports dishonesty.