If a systematic campaign of replication does not lead to the same results, then either the original research is flawed (as the replicators claim) or the replications are (as many of the original researchers on priming contend).
The problem with replications, then, is that if someone fails to replicate a given study, it might simply be because they didn't have access to this hidden knowledge, and didn't actually run the study in exactly the same way as the original.
Funding agencies should encourage replications and lower the barriers to reporting serious efforts which failed to reproduce a published result.
Often, only people with an axe to grind pursue replications with vigour a state of affairs which makes people wary of having their work replicated.There are ways, too, to make replication difficult.
The consequence is likely to be a big kerfuffle until yet further replications are carried out, ideally not at Oak Ridge, whose coffee room is now presumably at daggers-drawn.
Thanks to Alan Kraut, the director of the Association for Psychological Science, Perspectives on Psychological Science, one of the association's flagship publications, will soon have a section devoted to replications.
Sometimes replications make a difference and even hit the headlines as in the case of Thomas Herndon, a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts.
Many of these replications have failed.
Among human beings, imitation can include such everyday experiences as yawning when others yawn, a host of unconsciously and passively learned replications of social conduct, and the deliberate adoption of the ideas and habits of others.
In the late 1960s, prompted by the media's graphic coverage of the assassination of U.S. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy together with increased reports of children incurring serious injuries during attempted replications of dangerous behaviours depicted in television advertisements, the potential effects of television violence on children became a growing public concern.
Mitotic replications of the nuclear material presumably accompany or precede all divisions of the cytoplasm (cytokinesis) in protists.
