by
Benedict Carey and Michael Roston

In an unprecedented analysis, a team of 270 researchers redid about 100 studies published in three top psychology journals. The team was interested in duplicating them as closely as possible to see whether they held up. Only 35 did so, according to the most frequently used statistical test. Below are three popular studies that did not check out, along with some possible reasons.

Free will and cheating

In 2008, a paper in Psychological Science found that people were more likely to cheat on a test after they had read an essay arguing that behaviour was predetermined by environmental factors. The authors suggested from their findings that belief in free will had societal implications.

The redone study found an effect pointing in the same direction as the original but far weaker. One possible reason, the authors suggest, has to do with how subjects' opinions about free will were manipulated. Participants read an essay, and it's plausible that they were not as engaged in reading and thinking about it as were those in the first study.