Discrepant Data and Improbable Results: An Examination of Vohs, Mead, and Goode (2006)

Abstract

A highly cited article by Vohs, Mead, and Goode (2006) reported several experiments in which an incidental reminder of money produced large effects on subsequent behaviors unrelated to money. We attempted 2 high-powered direct replications of the first experiment, which found that money-primed subjects worked on a puzzle nearly twice as long as controls before quitting. The replication studies showed no evidence of money priming. Moreover, 25% of the subjects in our studies solved the puzzle correctly or incorrectly, whereas none reportedly did so in the original study. We also list anomalies in the reported results of the original study.

Notes

Acknowledgments

We thank David Trafimow for his helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

Notes

¹ We also wrote both coauthors to ask for information about Experiments 2 through 9, and we received a reply from only N. Mead, who referred us to the contact author, K. Vohs (personal communication, January 28, 2016). However, the coauthors are not listed as corresponding authors, and they might never have had the information we sought.

² Although Experiment 1 was conducted at the University of Minnesota, the SOM indicates that most of the experiments were conducted at the University of British Columbia, where K. Vohs was once a faculty member.