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              A recurring theme in the replication debate is the argument that certain findings don’t replicate or cannot be expected to replicate because the context in which the replication is carried out differs from the one in which the original study was performed. This argument is usually made after a failed replication. In most such cases, the original study did not provide a set of conditions under which the effect was predicted to hold, although the original paper often did  make grandiose claims about the effect’s relevance to variety of contexts including industry, politics, education, and beyond. If you fail to replicate this effect, it's a bit like you've just bought a car that was touted by the salesman as an "all-terrain vehicle," only to have the wheels come off as soon as you drive it off the lot.*             As this automotive analogy suggests, the field has two pro...

I’m working on a paper with Alex Etz, Rich Lucas, and Brent Donnellan. We had to cut 2,000 words and the text below is one of the darlings we killed. I’m reviving it as a blog post here because even though it made sense to cut the segment from the manuscript (I cut it myself, the others didn’t make me), the notion of concurrent replication is an important one. The current replication debate has, for various reasons, construed replication as a retrospective process. A research group decides to replicate a finding that is already in the published literature. Some of the most high-profile replication studies, for example, have focused on findings published decades earlier, for example the registered replication projects on verbal overshadowing (Alogna et al, 2014) and facial feedback (Wagenmakers et al., in press). This retrospective approach, however timely and important, might be partially responsible for the controversial reputation that replication currently enjoys. A form of...