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Famous cognitive psychology experiments that failed to replicate

Famous cognitive psychology experiments that failed to replicate

6 comments

·September 17, 2025
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delichon

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.

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.18248

glial

The incentive of all psychology researchers is to do new work rather than replications. Because of this, publicly-funded psychology PhDs should be required to perform study replication as part of their training. Protocol + results should be put in a database.

fsckboy

famous cognitive psychology experiments that do replicate: IQ tests

Terr_

> Source: Hagger et (63!) al. 2016

I can't help chuckling at the idea that over 1.98 * 10^87 people were involved in the paper.

SpaceManNabs

One thing that confuses me is that some of these papers were successfully replicated, so juxtaposing them to the ones that have not been replicated at all given the title of the page feels a bit off. Not sure if fair.

The ego depletion effect seems intuitively surprising to me. Science is often unintuitive. I do know that it is easier to make forward-thinking decisions when I am not tired so I dont know.

taeric

The idea isn't that it is easier to do things when not tired. It is that you specifically get tired exercising self control.

I think that can be subtly confused by people thinking you can't get better at self control with practice? That is, I would think a deliberate practice of doing more and more self control every day should build up your ability to do more self control. And it would be easy to think that that means you have a stamina for self control that depletes in the same way that aerobic fitness can work. But, those don't necessarily follow each other.