View article

Recent large-scale replication efforts have raised the question: how are we to interpret failures to replicate? Many have responded by pointing out conceptual or methodological discrepancies between the original and replication studies as potential explanations for divergent results as well as emphasizing the importance of contextual moderators. To illustrate the importance of accounting for discrepancies between original and replication studies as well as moderators, we turn to a recent example of a failed replication effort. Previous research has shown that individual differences in need for cognition interact with a message's argument quality to affect evaluation (Cacioppo, Petty, & Morris, 1983). However, a recent attempt failed to replicate this outcome (Ebersole et al., 2016). We propose that the latter study's null result was due to conducting a non-optimal replication attempt. We thus conducted a new study that …