This is more common than most people would like to think, I think. I experienced this tracking down sunk cost studies recently—everyone kept citing the same studies or reviews showing sunk cost in real world situations, but when you actually tracked back to the experiments, you saw they weren’t all that great even though they had been cited so much.
Did you find more recent replications as well? Or was the scientific community in question content that the old, not-so-good studies had found something real?
I didn’t find very many recent replications that supported the standard wisdom, but that may just be because it’s easier to find old much-cited material than new contrarian material, by following the citations in the prominent standard papers that I started with.
This is more common than most people would like to think, I think. I experienced this tracking down sunk cost studies recently—everyone kept citing the same studies or reviews showing sunk cost in real world situations, but when you actually tracked back to the experiments, you saw they weren’t all that great even though they had been cited so much.
Did you find more recent replications as well? Or was the scientific community in question content that the old, not-so-good studies had found something real?
I didn’t find very many recent replications that supported the standard wisdom, but that may just be because it’s easier to find old much-cited material than new contrarian material, by following the citations in the prominent standard papers that I started with.