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Today the second Registered Replication Report (RRR) was published in Perspectives on Psychological Science.  I am one of its authors. Here is some background on the project. I'll take you on a brief trip across three fields: linguistics, cognitive psychology, and social psychology. I'll discuss the results of the RRR and conclude with some lessons learned. Language is a tool with which we can “shape events in each other’s brains with exquisite precision” [1]. Linguistic analysis shows how subtle a tool language is. Take for example grammatical aspect . We can describe the same event by saying He was running to the finish line or by saying He ran to the finish line. Linguists have argued that these utterances “construe” the event differently [2]. Whereas the past progressive ( was running ) opens up the internal structure of the event, the simple past ( ran ) describes the event as completed. To get a better feel for this distinction, let's append a clause to the s...

Some years ago, when I served on the Academic Integrity Committee investigating allegations of fraud against Dirk Smeesters, it fell upon me to examine Word documents of some of his manuscripts (the few that were not “lost”). The “track changes” feature afforded me a glimpse of earlier versions of the manuscripts as well as of comments made by Smeesters and his co-authors. One thing that became immediately obvious was that while all authors had contributed to the introduction and discussion sections, Smeesters alone had pasted in the results sections. Sometimes, the results elicited comments from his co-authors: “Oh, I didn’t know we also collected these measures” to which Smeesters replied something like “Yeah, that’s what I routinely do.” Another comment I vividly remember is: “Wow, these results look even better than we expected. We’re smarter than we thought!” More than a little ironic in retrospect. On the one hand I found these discoveries reassuring. I had spent many hours ...

Sir Frederic, back when professors still looked like professors. Take a look at these sentences: A burning cigarette was carelessly discarded. Several acres of virgin forest were destroyed. You could let them stand as two unrelated utterances. But that’s not what you did, right? You inferred that the cigarette caused a fire, which destroyed the forest. We interpret new information based on what we know (that burning cigarettes can cause fires) to form a coherent representation of a situation . Rather than leaving the sentences unconnected, we impose a causal connection between the events described by the sentences. George W. Bush exploited this tendency to create coherence by continuously juxtaposing Saddam and 9-11 , thus fooling three-quarters of the American public into believing that Saddam was behind the attacks, without stating this explicitly. Sir Frederic Bartlett proposed that we are continuously engaged in an effort after meaning. This is what r...