Sep 18, 2025 23:40:00

Famous cognitive psychology experiments that have failed to be replicated

Reproducibility, or the ability to obtain the same results regardless of who conducts the experiment or when, is crucial for scientific knowledge and ensures objectivity. However, since the early 2010s, the field of psychology has faced a crisis of reliability known as the '

reproducibility crisis .' Many previously believed psychological effects have been found to lack reproducibility due to flaws in the experimenter's experimental setup or bias in interpretation, resulting in the discovery that they do not actually exist or have only weak effects. Marco Giancotti, who runs a blog covering science and philosophy topics, has compiled a list of well-known psychology experiments that have lost credibility due to the reproducibility crisis.

Famous Cognitive Psychology Experiments that Failed to Replicate - Aether Mug
https://aethermug.com/posts/famous-cognitive-psychology-experiments-that-failed-to-replicate

The 'reproducibility crisis' has been a hot topic in psychology, social science, and life sciences since the early 2010s, calling into question the reliability of academic disciplines as a whole. Many previously published studies fail to produce the same results when replicated by other researchers. In 2015, a group of psychology researchers attempted to replicate 100 recent psychology research papers, but were only able to replicate the results of 39 of them. A survey conducted by the academic journal Nature found that over 70% of researchers had failed to replicate experiments published by other scientists, and over 50% of researchers had failed to replicate their own experiments.

Scientific 'reproducibility' is in danger - GIGAZINE

by Carlos Henrique

'The reproducibility crisis was old news about a decade ago, and even then, there was only a vague recognition of the infamous results of studies whose reproducibility was in question,' Giancotti said. 'But it's unfortunate that, even though most research in cognitive psychology is actually reproducible, a few studies are damaging trust in the field as a whole. So we need to be clear about what is true and what is not.' He then lists and explains some well-known studies whose reproducibility has been in question.

Ego depletion effect
The idea of ego depletion is that 'our ego and willpower, which control us, have a 'battery' that gradually depletes as we exert self-control every day.' According to ego depletion, when tasks requiring self-control overlap, self-control can be depleted and hindered in subsequent, completely different tasks. A representative paper demonstrating the ego depletion effect was published in 1998 by American social psychologist Roy Baumeister and others, but a follow-up study conducted in 2016 concluded that the experimental effect was questionable.

Furthermore, a paper linking the ego-depletion effect to the idea that 'ingesting glucose replenishes depleted self-control' was later unable to be replicated, further strengthening the negative view of the original hypothesis.

・Power posing effect
The 'power posing effect' is the idea that standing with your hands on your hips or raising your arms for about two minutes in a stretched position increases testosterone, reduces the stress hormone cortisol, and makes you feel more confident and motivated. A 2010 paper by Amy Cuddy et al. demonstrated this effect, but in 2015 several researchers reported that the effect could not be replicated in experiments. As a result, Dana Carney, a co-author of the 2010 paper, released a statement in 2016 saying, 'We are revising our view of the power posing effect. Some of the facts about the original experiment were due to a small sample size and unreliable results, and we no longer believe it to be genuine.'

Priming effect
The 'priming effect' refers to the phenomenon in which behavior is influenced by a preceding stimulus. Psychologically, occult phenomena such as the 'Kokkuri-san' game are sometimes thought to be influenced by the priming effect. A 1996 paper demonstrating the priming effect showed that participants walked more slowly immediately after being given preceding stimuli containing words and images related to stereotypes of elderly people, and participants who were given concepts related to rudeness were more likely to interrupt others. A 2012 follow-up study questioned the validity of this paper, concluding that 'unconscious priming does exist, but the findings in the 1996 paper are unreliable and involve a different mechanism.'

A psychology professor examines the scientific explanation of the Western version of Kokkuri-san, the Ouija board - GIGAZINE

・ESP prediction effect
Extrasensory perception (ESP) is a type of psychic ability that includes telepathy, precognition, and clairvoyance. In a 2011 paper , over 1,000 participants were tested to see if they could perceive future events as precognition or premonitions. The paper concluded that 'in some cases, people may be able to predict future events that cannot be predicted by existing reasoning processes,' but subsequent follow-up tests have deemed this conclusion scientifically unsupportable.

The effects of cleanliness and morality
In a 2008 paper published by researchers at the University of Plymouth in England, experiments showed that maintaining cleanliness or thinking about cleanliness led people to make less lenient moral judgments. A replication experiment in 2014 found no evidence linking cleanliness and moral judgments, even using the sample size required to detect the original effect size. It is believed that the original experiment's sample size was too small and biased.

Hunger and risk
When given instinctive cues that indicate proximity to the object of desire, people may be overly influenced by the expected reward of immediate gratification rather than the risks associated with consumption behavior. A 2006 paper showed that among people who participated in a game in which participants had to acquire chocolate chip cookies over time, participants who were able to actually see the cookies and smell the freshly baked smell were more willing to risk losing in order to obtain the reward. A 2016 replication experiment of this experiment failed to observe any major effects, concluding that 'widely held hypotheses need to be reconsidered.'

・Psychological distance and construal level theory
The idea is that 'psychologically distant' events are processed more abstractly, while 'psychologically close' events are processed more concretely: 'If a task is due tomorrow, we worry about its difficulty, but if we plan the same task far into the future, we find it appealing.' While papers published in 1998 and 2010 are representative examples, many doubts have been raised about the validity of this theory, and researchers from the Department of Psychology at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden are leading a collaborative effort involving 73 research institutes around the world to verify the theory.

The influence of ovulation and preferences
A 2014 meta-analysis showed that women are more likely to feel sexually attracted to handsome men on days during their menstrual cycle when they are relatively more likely to conceive, compared to days when they are less likely to conceive. However, multiple studies have pointed out that the theory in this paper cannot be replicated, and the majority of research suggests that the effect of ovulation on preference cannot be determined.

・Marshmallow test
The marshmallow test is a famous study conducted by psychologists at Stanford University in the late 1960s and early 1970s in which children were given a choice between a small immediate reward and a larger reward after waiting. Those who were able to resist the marshmallow reward were rated as superior later in life. This experiment showed that 'people who have self-control as children are more likely to achieve social success in the future.'

However, a study published in 2018 showed that the results of the marshmallow test are 'limited,' and that whether a young child can resist the first marshmallow depends largely on the child's social and economic background, rather than on the child's self-control. In other words, children with highly educated and wealthy parents are usually given sufficient resources, so they can resist eating the marshmallow in front of them. However, even if that child succeeds in the future, it is not based on the self-control to resist the marshmallow, but rather on the influence of the environment of having 'highly educated and wealthy parents.'

The 'marshmallow experiment,' which claimed that children's self-control influences their future, failed to replicate, and the 'economic and social environment' has a greater impact than self-control - GIGAZINE

by Blaque X

- Women's math achievement
There is a stereotype that 'women have inferior mathematical abilities compared to men.' One paper considered that this stereotype could cause anxiety and threat and affect actual performance. When a difficult math test was administered after explaining that gender differences would not affect the test, it was demonstrated that the difference in performance between men and women could be eliminated. This experiment could not be replicated through numerous follow-up tests and meta-analyses, and while there may have been an effect, it was very small, and it is believed that 'it is likely that the universality and strength of the effect were overestimated.'

Smiling makes you feel better
There is a belief that 'facial expressions not only express emotions but also influence emotional experiences.' A 1998 paper compared participants reading manga while holding a pen between their teeth (forcing a smiling facial expression) with those holding the pen between their lips (not smiling), and showed that participants rated the manga as more interesting when they were smiling. However, multiple meta-analyses, while acknowledging the possibility that facial expressions can feed back into emotions, questioned the strength of the experiment's effect.

・Mozart effect
The idea that listening to classical music from an early age has a positive effect on children's intelligence is known as the 'Mozart effect.' It was first proven in a 1993 Nature paper and was believed by 80% of Americans. However, subsequent research has shown that it is surprisingly difficult to replicate.

Research shows that listening to Mozart doesn't improve children's intelligence - GIGAZINE

By Sean Dreilinger

Bilinguals are smart
Being bilingual is thought to provide significant cognitive benefits in attention, task switching, and executive control, and a 2012 paper examined the effects of bilingualism on cognitive function in adulthood. The paper showed that while the effect of bilingualism was somewhat weaker in adulthood, it played a major role in 'cognitive reserve,' preventing cognitive decline in old age. However, a 2018 follow-up study found only a limited effect that depended on specific conditions, and concluded that the evidence was insufficient to demonstrate a universal benefit.

While many experiments facing a reproducibility crisis rarely produce false or completely zero effects, many are considered to be significantly exaggerated and not as strong as those shown in the original paper. However, the quality of replication studies varies, and it can be difficult to determine whether a failure to replicate is due to a problem with the original experiment or because the conditions were different. Giancotti's list is representative but not comprehensive, so he encourages readers to 'respond via the newsletter if we've missed any well-known studies that have been debunked.'