Big secrets do not necessarily cause hills to appear steeper

Slepian, Masicampo, Toosi, and Ambady ( Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 141, 619–624, 2012 , Study 1) found that individuals recalling and writing about a big, meaningful secret judged a pictured hill as steeper than did those who recalled and wrote about a small, inconsequential secret...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Psychonomic bulletin & review 2014-06, Vol.21 (3), p.696-700
Main Authors: LeBel, Etienne P., Wilbur, Christopher J.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adolescent
Adult
Aged
Behavioral Science and Psychology
Biological and medical sciences
Brief Report
Cognition & reasoning
Cognition. Intelligence
Cognitive Psychology
Consent
Female
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Humans
Male
Middle Aged
Miscellaneous
Psychology
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Research Design - standards
Space Perception - physiology
Studies
Young Adult
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Summary:Slepian, Masicampo, Toosi, and Ambady ( Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 141, 619–624, 2012 , Study 1) found that individuals recalling and writing about a big, meaningful secret judged a pictured hill as steeper than did those who recalled and wrote about a small, inconsequential secret (with estimates unrelated to physical effort unaffected). From an embodied cognition perspective, this result was interpreted as suggesting that important secrets weigh people down. Answering to mounting calls for the crucial need of independent direct replications of published findings to ensure the self-correcting nature of our science, we sought to corroborate Slepian et al.’s finding in two extremely high-powered, preregistered studies that were very faithful to all procedural and methodological details of the original study (i.e., same cover story, study title, manipulation, measures, item order, scale anchors, task instructions, sampling frame, population, and statistical analyses). In both samples, we were unsuccessful in replicating the target finding. Although Slepian et al. reported three other studies supporting the secret burdensomeness phenomenon, we advise that these three other findings need to be independently corroborated before the general phenomenon informs theory or health interventions.
ISSN:1069-9384
1531-5320
DOI:10.3758/s13423-013-0549-2