GB793 Unit 8 Replication Assessment Example

Reminders of Money Under Retest: A Unit 8 Replication Assessment of the Money Priming Effect

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Purdue University Global

GB793: Advanced Topics in Management

Unit 8 Replication Assessment

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[Date]

The assessment concerns real published studies; its verdicts are the candidate's.

Why This Finding Matters to Management

Money priming entered management teaching because it seemed to say something about pay. If brief reminders of money make people more focused on themselves and less helpful, then the way organizations talk about compensation, display bonuses or frame incentives might shape cooperation at work. The finding was taught in courses on motivation and reward and cited in discussions of whether financial incentives crowd out helping. Whether it holds therefore matters beyond psychology.

Part One: The Original Studies and the Retests

Vohs et al. (2006) reported a series of experiments in which participants were reminded of money in subtle ways, such as unscrambling phrases about money, seeing a screensaver of floating bills or sitting near a stack of play money. Compared with control participants, those reminded of money worked longer on a difficult task before asking for help, offered less help to others, for example by picking up fewer spilled pencils for a stranger, and chose to work alone more often. Each experiment was small, with a few dozen participants per study, but the pattern was consistent across them.

Caruso et al. (2013) extended the idea to attitudes. Participants briefly exposed to images of money, such as a faint background of currency on a computer screen, expressed stronger endorsement of free-market systems and of social hierarchy.

Rohrer et al. (2015) attempted to replicate the attitude findings of Caruso and colleagues in four large experiments, with two more reported in appendixes. They found no effect of money reminders on any of the attitude measures.

Part Two: Fidelity of the Replications

A failed replication is informative only if it reproduced the conditions that produced the original effect. The Rohrer replications used the same kinds of manipulations as the originals, including the background currency images, and the same attitude measures, administered to similar populations. Small differences in setting can never be ruled out entirely, and a faint visual prime is exactly the kind of manipulation that minor changes in setting or attention might weaken. But the retests were repeated across several experiments with closely matched procedures, and every one of them found nothing. The fidelity of the retests is high enough that their results cannot be dismissed as tests of a different procedure.

Part Three: How Much a Null Result Shows

A null result in a replication does not by itself show that an effect is zero. A replication could fail because the effect is real but smaller than the original suggested. Simonsohn (2015) proposed a way to judge this: ask whether the replication can rule out an effect small enough that the original study would have had only a one-in-three chance of detecting it. If the replication's confidence interval excludes even that small effect, the original study, with its sample size, could not have been detecting anything real.

Applied here, the original attitude studies had small samples, so the effect they could detect with reasonable probability was large. The replications, with samples many times larger, produced estimates close to zero with narrow confidence intervals. By Simonsohn's standard, they rule out effects of the size the original studies were equipped to detect. The original studies are therefore unlikely to have been detecting a real effect of the reported magnitude.

A large replication that rules out an effect the original study could barely have seen tells us the original was more likely lucky than right.

Part Four: The Wider Literature

Lodder et al. (2019) conducted a meta-analysis of money priming, gathering 246 experiments, published and unpublished. The overall effect estimate was moderate, with a Hedges' g of about .31. But the funnel plots were strongly asymmetric, and several tests indicated publication bias: small studies with large effects were overrepresented, which is the pattern produced when studies with null results go unpublished. The largest effects appeared in laboratory studies with behavioral outcomes in which participants physically handled money. The authors called for large, preregistered replications before the effects could be treated as established.

Why the Original Pattern Looked So Convincing

It is worth asking why the original findings seemed persuasive. Vohs and colleagues reported a sequence of experiments, each with a different manipulation and a different measure of helping or self-reliance, all pointing the same way. A consistent pattern across several studies looks like strong evidence. But if each study was small and only the studies that reached significance were reported, a consistent pattern can arise even when the true effect is small or absent. The publication bias detected by Lodder and colleagues is exactly the mechanism that would produce such a pattern across a literature. Consistency across small studies is therefore weaker evidence than consistency across large ones, and the retests of the attitude effects were the first large tests the idea faced.

A Verdict by Outcome

The evidence supports different verdicts for different outcomes.

Attitudes toward markets and inequality. Very unlikely to show the effect reported. Large, high-fidelity replications found none, and the Simonsohn test indicates the original studies could not have been detecting a real effect of their reported size.

Helping and self-reliance after subtle reminders. Doubtful. These were the original Vohs findings. They have not been subjected to retests as large as those for the attitude effects, but the meta-analytic evidence of publication bias applies to them, and the small sample sizes of the original experiments make their effect sizes unreliable.

Behavior after physically handling money. Open. The meta-analysis found its largest effects here, and handling real money is a stronger manipulation than a faint image. Whether the effect survives preregistered testing remains to be seen.

What This Means for Management Teaching

The finding should no longer be taught as an established effect of money on cooperation. At most, it can be presented as a hypothesis that early evidence suggested and that larger tests have largely failed to support, especially for subtle reminders. Questions about how compensation affects helping at work are better addressed by field evidence on actual pay systems than by laboratory primes.

The case also offers a lesson for reading research generally. A finding published in a prominent journal, supported by several experiments and easy to explain in a classroom, can still rest on small samples and a literature shaped by what got published. Before teaching such a finding, an instructor can ask three questions: how large were the samples, has anyone run a large retest, and does a meta-analysis show signs of missing null results.

References

Caruso, E. M., Vohs, K. D., Baxter, B., & Waytz, A. (2013). Mere exposure to money increases endorsement of free-market systems and social inequality. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 142(2), 301-306. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0029288

Lodder, P., Ong, H. H., Grasman, R. P. P. P., & Wicherts, J. M. (2019). A comprehensive meta-analysis of money priming. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 148(4), 688-712. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000570

Rohrer, D., Pashler, H., & Harris, C. R. (2015). Do subtle reminders of money change people's political views? Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 144(4), e73-e85. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000058

Simonsohn, U. (2015). Small telescopes: Detectability and the evaluation of replication results. Psychological Science, 26(5), 559-569. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797614567341

Vohs, K. D., Mead, N. L., & Goode, M. R. (2006). The psychological consequences of money. Science, 314(5802), 1154-1156. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1132491