Interpreting a failure to replicate is complicated by the fact that the failure could be due to the original finding being a false positive, unrecognized moderating influences between the original and replication procedures, or faulty implementation of the procedures in the replication. One strategy to maximize replication quality is involving the original authors in study design. We (N = 21 Labs and N = 2,220 participants) experimentally tested whether original author involvement improved replicability of a classic finding from Terror Management Theory (Greenberg et al., 1994). Our results were non-diagnostic of whether original author involvement improves replicability because we were unable to replicate the finding under any conditions. This suggests that the original finding was either a false positive or the conditions necessary to obtain it are not yet understood or no longer exist. Data, materials, analysis code, preregistration, and supplementary documents can be found on the OSF page: https://osf.io/8ccnw/

Interpreting a failure to replicate is complicated by the fact that the failure could be due to the original finding being a false positive, unrecognized moderating influences between the original and replication procedures, or faulty implementation of the procedures in the replication. One strategy to maximize replication quality is involving the original authors in study design. We (N = 17 Labs and N = 1,550 participants, after exclusions) experimentally tested whether original author involvement improved replicability of a classic finding from Terror Management Theory (Greenberg et al., 1994). Our results were non-diagnostic of whether original author involvement improves replicability because we were unable to replicate the finding under any conditions. This suggests that the original finding was either a false positive or the conditions necessary to obtain it are not fully understood or no longer exist. Data, materials, analysis code, preregistration, and supplementary documents can be found on the OSF page: https://osf.io/8ccnw/

Awareness of stereotypes about a person’s in-group can affect a person’s behavior and performance when they complete a stereotype-relevant task, a phenomenon called stereotype susceptibility. Shih, Pittinsky, and Ambady (1999) primed Asian American women with either their Asian identity (stereotyped with high math ability) or female identity (stereotyped with low math ability) or no priming before administering a math test. Of the three groups, Asian-primed participants performed best on the math test, female-primed participants performed worst. The article is a citation classic, but the original studies and conceptual replications have low sample sizes and wide confidence intervals. We conducted a replication of Shih et al. (1999) with a large sample and found a significant effect with the same pattern of means after removing participants that did not know the race or gender stereotypes, but not when those participants were retained. Math identification did not moderate the observed effects.

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People often associate women more with emotions, or affect in general, compared to men (e.g., Barrett & Bliss-Moreau, 2009); however, it is unknown whether some women will have a stronger association between self and affect or others and cognition than other women. We predicted that higher need for cognition (NFC; Cacioppo et al., 1984), or the enjoyment of cognitive processes, would be associated with stronger self-cognition/others-affect implicit associations. We also predicted that women with stronger self-cognition/others-affect associations would be less likely to endorse STEM stereotypes. We also expected a positive relationship between NFC and explicit self-cognition/others-affect associations. To test these predictions, we conducted a study on Project Implicit investigating the relationship between NFC, affect-cognition associations with the self and others, and endorsement of women in STEM stereotypes (Jackson et al., 2014). We found that higher NFC scores were associated with decreased endorsement of stereotypical affect-cognition implicit associations in women, r(280) = −.14, p = .022, 95% CI [−0.25, −0.02]. There was no significant association between self-affect/others-cognition implicit associations and STEM stereotype endorsement, r(278) = −.05, p = .421, 95% CI [−0.17, 0.07]. Importantly, we found that the relationship between NFC and self-affect/others-cognition associations exists when using both an implicit and explicit measure. NFC may increase the likelihood of women making the counter-stereotypical association of themselves with cognition as opposed to affect. It is important to know who endorses these stereotypes, and future studies should continue to examine the trait NFC, affect-cognition associations, and related interest in STEM.