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My former colleague Roy Baumeister famously said that replication is a "career niche for bad experimenters.”* I like to use this quote in my talk. Roy is wrong, of course. As anyone who has tried to conduct a replication study knows, it requires a great deal of skill to perform replications. This leads to the question Is there a career niche for replicators? I was asked this question yesterday when I gave a talk on Making Replication Mainstream at the marvellous Donders Institute for Cognition, Brain, and Behaviour  in Nijmegen. I get asked this question regularly. My standard answer is that it is not a good career choice. Implicit in this answer is the idea that in order to become a tenured faculty member, one has to make a unique contribution to the literature. Promotion-and-tenure writers are always asked to comment on the uniqueness of a candidate’s work. Someone who only conducts replication studies would run the risk of not meeting the current requirements to become

Update February 3: I added a Twitter response made by the first author. In the commentary section a comment by the second author. I just submitted my review of the manuscript Experimental Design and the Reliability of Priming Effects: Reconsidering the "Train Wreck" by Rivers and Sherman. Here it is. The authors start with two important observations. First, semantic priming experiments yield robust effects, whereas “social priming” (I’m following the authors’ convention of using quotation marks here) experiments do not. Second, semantic priming experiments use within-subjects designs, whereas “social priming” experiments use between-subjects designs. The authors are right in pointing out that this latter fact has not received sufficient attention. The authors’ goal is to demonstrate that the second fact is the cause of the first. Here is how they summarize their results in the abstract: “These results indicate that the key difference between priming effects identifi

A number of years ago, my colleagues Peter Verkoeijen, Katinka Dijkstra, several undergraduate students, and I conducted a replication of Experiment 5 of Kidd & Castano (2013). In that study, published in Science,  participants were exposed to an excerpt from either literary fiction or from non-literary fiction. Kidd and Castano hypothesized that brief exposure to literary fiction as opposed to non-literary fiction would enhance empathy in people because of the greater psychological finesse in literary novels than in non-literary novels. Anyone who has read, say, Proust as well as Michael Crichton will probably intuit what Kidd and Castano were getting at. Their results showed indeed that people who had been briefly exposed to the literary excerpt showed more empathy in Theory of Mind (ToM) tests than participants who had been briefly exposed to the non-literary excerpt. Because the study touches on some of our own interests, text comprehension, literature, empathy and becaus