Famous Cognitive Psychology Experiments that Failed to Replicate - Social sciences found to be 63% fake and gay

https://aethermug.com/posts/famous-cognitive-psychology-experiments-that-failed-to-replicate
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The field of psychology had a big crisis in the 2010s, when many widely accepted results turned out to be much less solid than previously thought. It's called the replication crisis, because labs around the world tried and failed to replicate, in new experiments, previous results published by their original "discoverers". In other words, many reported psychological effects were either non-existent—artifacts of the experimenter's flawed setup—or so much weaker than originally claimed that they lost most of their intellectual sparkle.

(The crisis spanned other fields as well, but I mostly care about psychology here, especially the cognitive kind.)

This is very old news, and I've been vaguely aware of several of the biggest disgraced results for years, but I keep on forgetting which are (still probably) real and which aren't. This is not good. Most results in the field do actually replicate and are robust[citation needed], so it would be a pity to lose confidence in the whole field just because of a few bad apples.

This post is a compact reference list of the most (in)famous cognitive science results that failed to replicate and should, for the time being, be considered false. The only goal is to offset the trust-undermining effects of my poor memory—and perhaps yours, too?—with a bookmarkable page.

This can't be a comprehensive list: if a study is not on this page, it's not guaranteed to be fully replicated. Still, this should cover most of the high-profile debunked theories that laypeople like me may have heard of.

Credit: I enlisted the help of Kimi K2, o3, and Sonnet 4 to gather and fact-check this list. I also checked, pruned, and de-hallucinated all the results.

Ego Depletion Effect​

• Claimed result: We have a "willpower battery" that gradually depletes during the day as we exercise self-control. (I remember reading Baumeister's pop-science book and being awed by the implications of their findings; I might have known it sounded too good to be true.)
• Representative paper: Baumeister et al. 1998
• Replication status: did not replicate
• Source: Hagger et (63!) al. 2016

Power Posing Effect​

• Claimed result: Adopting expansive body postures for 2 minutes (like standing with hands on hips or arms raised) increases testosterone, decreases cortisol, and makes people feel more powerful and take more risks.
• Representative paper: Carney, Cuddy, & Yap (2010)
• Replication status: did not replicate
• Source: Ranehill et al. (2015)

Social Priming: Elderly Words Effect​

• Claimed result: People walk more slowly after being exposed to words related to elderly stereotypes.
• Representative paper: Bargh, Chen, & Burrows (1996)
• Replication status: did not replicate
• Source: Doyen et al. (2012) (I like how they prove that the psychological effect was actually in the experimenters, rather than the subjects!)

Money Priming Effect​

• Claimed result: Simply thinking about money makes you more selfish and more likely to endorse free market values.
• Representative paper: Vohs, Mead, & Goode (2006)
• Replication status: did not replicate
• Source: Rohrer, Pashler, & Harris (2015)

ESP Precognition Effect​

• Claimed result: In some cases, people can predict future events "that could not otherwise be anticipated through any known inferential process".
• Representative paper: Bem (2011)
• Replication status: did not replicate
• Source: Galak et al. (2012), Ritchie, Wiseman, & French (2012)

Cleanliness and Morality Effect​

• Claimed result: Being clean or thinking about cleanliness makes people more morally lax.
• Representative paper: Schnall, Benton, & Harvey (200
• Replication status: did not replicate
• Source: Johnson, Cheung, & Donnellan (2014)

Glucose and Ego Depletion Effect​

• Claimed result: Connected to the debunked ego-depletion effect, this one claims that adding glucose to your blood "recharges" the willpower battery. (For a while, I may have drunk more orange juice than usual after reading Baumeister's book. At least it's healthy-ish.)
• Representative paper: Gailliot & Baumeister (2007)
• Replication status: did not replicate
• Source: Lange & Eggert (2014)

Hunger and Risk-Taking Effect​

• Claimed result: People exposed to the scent of freshly baked cookies become less sensitive to risk and take more risks to obtain food.
• Representative paper: Ditto et al. 2006
• Replication status: did not replicate
• Source: Festjens, Bruyneel, & Dewitte (201

Psychological Distance & Construal Level Theory​

• Claimed result: "Psychologically distant" events are processed more abstractly, while "psychologically near" events are processed more concretely. E.g., you worry about the difficulty of a task if you have to do it tomorrow, but you see the same task's attractive side if it is planned far in the future.
• Representative paper: Trope & Liberman (2010), building on Liberman & Trope (199
• Replication status: serious credibility problems
• Source: A collaboration between 73 labs around the world is vetting this theory right now because of many doubts about its validity.

Ovulation & Mate Preferences Effect​

• Claimed result: Women are more attracted to hot guys during high-fertility days of their cycles.
• Representative paper: Gildersleeve, Haselton, & Fales (2014)
• Replication status: did not replicate
• Source: Stern, Gerlach, & Penke (2020)

Marshmallow Test & Long-Term Success Effect​

• Claimed result: Children's ability to resist eating a marshmallow when left alone in a room at age 4-5 strongly predicts adolescent achievement, with those who waited longer showing better life outcomes.
• Representative paper: Shoda, Mischel, & Peake (1990)
• Replication status: did not replicate significantly
• Source: Watts, Duncan, & Quan (201

Stereotype Threat (Women's Math Performance) Effect​

• Claimed result: Women risk being judged by the negative stereotype that women have weaker math ability, and this apprehension disrupts their math performance on difficult tests.
• Representative paper: Spencer, Steele, & Quinn (1999)
• Replication status: did not replicate
• Source: Flore & Wicherts (2015)

Smile to Feel Better Effect​

• Claimed result: Holding a pen in your teeth (forcing a smile-like expression) makes you rate cartoons as funnier compared to holding a pen with your lips (preventing smiling). More broadly, facial expressions can influence emotional experiences: "fake it till you make it."
• Representative paper: Strack, Martin, & Stepper (198
• Replication status: did not replicate
• Source: Wagenmakers et (54!) al. (2016)

Objective Measurement of Biases​

• Claimed result: You can predict if someone is racist by how quickly they answer certain trick questions.
• Representative paper: Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz (199
• Replication status: mixed evidence with small effects
• Source: Oswald et al. (2013) shows that the prediction power is small at best.

Mozart Effect​

• Claimed result: Listening to Mozart temporarily makes you smarter.
• Representative paper: Rauscher, Shaw, & Ky (1993)
• Replication status: did not replicate
• Source: Pietschnig, Voracek, & Formann (2010) (What a title!)

Growth Mindset Interventions​

• Claimed result: Teaching students that intelligence is malleable (not fixed) dramatically improves academic performance.
• Representative paper: Dweck, & Leggett (198
• Replication status: mixed results - many failed replications but also some successful replications
• Failed replication source: Li & Bates 2019
• Notable successful replication: Yeager et al. 2019 in Nature

Bilinguals Are Smarter​

• Claimed result: Being bilingual provides substantial cognitive advantages in attention, task-switching, and executive control.
• Representative paper: Bialystok, Craik, & Luk (2012)
• Replication status: did not replicate
• Source: Lehtonen et al. 2018

 

[Nice Stick]

Approximate replication rates in psychology:

- social 37%
- cognitive 42%
- personality 55%
- clinical 44%

So a list of famous psychology experiments that do replicate may be shorter.

 

[National Defense Advocate]

The Stanford Prison Experiment is another mostly made up one.
The entire field of psychology is mostly bullshit.

 

[SirCliveSinclairdabbing]

ESP Precognition Effect

True or not David Dunne - experiments with time is a better and more engaging write up on it than that 2011 paper.

 

[Gandhi's Left Hook]

EMDR is the only psychology I really believe. Any study done by a company to get people to buy more of their shit generally has results backed data as well otherwise companies stop doing it.

 

[Kingfisher9000]

Power Posing Effect​

• Claimed result: Adopting expansive body postures for 2 minutes (like standing with hands on hips or arms raised) increases testosterone, decreases cortisol, and makes people feel more powerful and take more risks.

I don’t care what this article says, I know deep in my heart that T-posing increases my T.

 

[WielkiWapiesz2137]

Everything that doesn't involve mathematics is fake and gay. Also psychologists should be shot for coming up with mental retardation such as "Being clean or thinking about cleanliness makes people more morally lax." or deported to India but that might be excessive cruelty.

 

[KiwiFuzz2]

The Stanford Prison Experiment is another mostly made up one.
The entire field of psychology is mostly bullshit.

I dunno, I found that the longer a rape slave was kept in my home dungeon, the more cavalier and based I got about torturing them. But maybe a sample size of 63 isn't enough to produce meaningful results.

 

[Oilspill Battery]

Ego Depletion Effect​

• Claimed result: We have a "willpower battery" that gradually depletes during the day as we exercise self-control. (I remember reading Baumeister's pop-science book and being awed by the implications of their findings; I might have known it sounded too good to be true.)

These niggas had to run a university funded study to discover the concept of patience.

 

[Safir]

These niggas had to run a university funded study to discover the concept of patience.

No, their narrower and false claim is that patience runs out in unrelated situations. If you're trying to do a thing and getting unjustifiably cockblocked all day, it's normal to eventually resort to drastic measures to see progress. Psychologists say patience is finite no matter what and you're going to run out of it like a spoony.

---
The journo is a faggot, all this and more has been compiled on xitter in pre-AI days by (I think) the crow guy.

 

[CircuSphere]

Marshmallow Test & Long-Term Success Effect

RIP you were prime shitpost ammunition and you will be missed.

Bilinguals Are Smarter

Don't worry they will still be smug and superior about it.

Smile to Feel Better Effect

The loathsome cult of false positivity has been dealt a blow on this day... but they won't care or admit it so I will (ironically) go back to being pessimistic about the whole thing.

 

[Oilspill Battery]

No, their narrower and false claim is that patience runs out in unrelated situations. If you're trying to do a thing and getting unjustifiably cockblocked all day, it's normal to eventually resort to drastic measures to see progress. Psychologists say patience is finite no matter what and you're going to run out of it like a spoony.

---
The journo is a faggot, all this and more has been compiled on xitter in pre-AI days by (I think) the crow guy.

Really depends on what you consider related. If you spend 5 hours trying to fix the oven to no avail, and after you're done you go to sit on the pc and it throws you a bluescreen, you're gonna scream no?

The two aren't related but your patience was already drained from the oven.

 

[Strix454]

Every decade we seem to reach this same conclusion. But the psychology and the broader social sciences march on. I mean it was well known by the 1960s that this sort of stuff was able to produce any result that the researchers wanted. It was completely discredited. And yet here we are 60 years later still being surprised by this.

They need to at least repackage psychology with a new name like they did with sociology. They called sociology "freakanomics" and everyone was convinced that it was some new thing.

 

[Rootless Cosmopolitan]

I think the most damaging lies have been the “priming”, “nudging”, and “stereotype threat” lies. These have been the excuse for unholy amounts of propaganda.

 

[Lifeguard Hermit]

So when dealing with responses and trying to mold people into forming better coping methods as to direct them to more productive immediate responses; removing an environmental factor alone has become the standard due to how profound the results can be.

Im kind of wondering if they produced some of these results in hopes that there would be a dog whistle to others to produce said results. If the only criterion for backing up this type of intangible "medicine" is the reproduction of results we should be weary of a of the poisoning the well in the future.

I understand peer review and replicating results is 9/10 of all science but in these studies particularly there should be a little more oversight if we're talking about actual societal issues and things that could radically modify how we teach people to respond to each other.

Edit: I mean to say if someone has invested time, money, and their interest in doing this already we should maybe have a vested interest in keeping the playing field even.

 

[REGENDarySumanai]

If this many famous experiments in psychology cannot be replicated, I fear what other experiments cannot be replicated. Science prides itself on being repeatable with the same results. Open source, if you will.

 

[Raven of the Burning God]

Any study done by a company to get people to buy more of their shit generally has results backed data as well otherwise companies stop doing it.

This has some relevance to the Replication Crisis since sales and advertising techniques lose effectiveness with use as the targeted populations become familiar and recognize it as manipulation and false engagement. You also have things like placebo being a more effective medical treatment today compared to the past due to people having a higher expectation that medical treatment will improve their condition.

Those effects might have been 100% real at the time they were originally researched, but once the finding were incorporated into propaganda, people have adapted, grown resistant to it, and now it no longer works. But maybe, after a decade or two of non-use, letting people forget or a new generation ever be exposed to the manipulation, the effects could return.

I'm kinda interested to see if the cocomelon kids are all just permanently brain damaged or if some will end up more-or-less immune to many types of advertising.

 

[Clotso Coof]

Mozart Effect​

• Claimed result: Listening to Mozart temporarily makes you smarter.

I remember seeing ads for a company selling a device that went over a pregnant woman's belly, so she could broadcast classical music to her fetus for a few minutes here and there. Sounds like a joke, but it wasn't. They cited this study and strongly implied you could get a genius baby for 4 easy payments of $x.

 

[indomitable snowman]

Ego Depletion Effect​

• Claimed result: We have a "willpower battery" that gradually depletes during the day as we exercise self-control. (I remember reading Baumeister's pop-science book and being awed by the implications of their findings; I might have known it sounded too good to be true.)
• Representative paper: Baumeister et al. 1998
• Replication status: did not replicate
• Source: Hagger et (63!) al. 2016

Is this spoon theory?

Objective Measurement of Biases​

• Claimed result: You can predict if someone is racist by how quickly they answer certain trick questions.
• Representative paper: Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz (199
• Replication status: mixed evidence with small effects
• Source: Oswald et al. (2013) shows that the prediction power is small at best.

Question: What is 13% but also 50%?
Me: It's actually higher than 50%....

 

[Gandhi's Left Hook]

I'm kinda interested to see if the cocomelon kids are all just permanently brain damaged

From my experience gaming as the youngest of generation X, which is totally subjective I know, about 25% of zoomers are based and the other 75% are hopeless. The issue wont be if there are enough people in control of their senses but will those people let go of their childhood friendships with the crazies and forge a better society.