Psychological scientists have recently started to reconsider the importance of close replications in building a cumulative knowledge base; however, there is no consensus about what constitutes a ...convincing close replication study. To facilitate convincing close replication attempts we have developed a Replication Recipe, outlining standard criteria for a convincing close replication. Our Replication Recipe can be used by researchers, teachers, and students to conduct meaningful replication studies and integrate replications into their scholarly habits.
•Close replications are an important part of cumulative science.•Yet, little agreement exists about what makes a replication convincing.•We develop a Replication Recipe to facilitate close replication attempts.•This includes the faithful recreation of a study with high statistical power.•We discuss evaluating replication results and limitations of replications.
Literature in interpersonal relations has described the sense of intimacy towards others in terms of physical closeness and warmth. Research suggests that these descriptions should be taken ...literally. Past work (IJzerman & Semin, 2009) revealed that temperature alterations affect the construal of social relations. Lakoff and Johnson (1999) suggest that such findings are unidirectional. However, recent research indicates that the recollection of social exclusion induces perceptions of lower temperature (Zhong & Leonardelli, 2008). In this work, we elaborate on these findings to provide new insights into processes central to interpersonal relations. In the current report, we hypothesized and found that a) actual
physically induced experiences of proximity induce perceptions of higher temperature. Moreover, we show that b)
verbally induced social proximity
What leads people to describe some of their interpersonal relationships as "close" and "warm" and others as "distant" and "cold"?
Landau, Meier, and Keefer (2010)
proposed that conceptual metaphors ...facilitate social cognition by allowing people to use knowledge from a relatively concrete (source) domain (e.g., physical distance) in understanding a different, usually more abstract (target) concept (e.g., love). We concur that such a notion of metaphors can greatly enrich the field of social cognition. At the same time, we believe it is important to devote greater theoretical attention to the nature of metaphorical representations in social cognition. We believe that Landau et al. place too much emphasis on sociocognitive metaphors as top-down knowledge structures and pay too little attention to the constraints that shape metaphors from the bottom up. In the present contribution, we highlight important bottom-up constraints, imposed through bodily constraints and social scaffolds. Sociocognitive metaphors do not exist just for mental representation but for action as well. We discuss the relevance of grounding sociocognitive metaphors for broader motivational purposes.
The credibility of scientific claims depends upon the transparency of the research products upon which they are based (e.g., study protocols, data, materials, and analysis scripts). As psychology ...navigates a period of unprecedented introspection, user-friendly tools and services that support open science have flourished. However, the plethora of decisions and choices involved can be bewildering. Here we provide a practical guide to help researchers navigate the process of preparing and sharing the products of their research (e.g., choosing a repository, preparing their research products for sharing, structuring folders, etc.). Being an open scientist means adopting a few straightforward research management practices, which lead to less error prone, reproducible research workflows. Further, this adoption can be piecemeal – each incremental step towards complete transparency adds positive value. Transparent research practices not only improve the efficiency of individual researchers, they enhance the credibility of the knowledge generated by the scientific community.
In this article, we comment on the replication attempt by Ebersole and colleagues (2015) on the effect that communal (vs. agentic) priming leads to estimates of higher ambient temperature. We ...conclude that the probability that the effect is true is considerable, but only at lower ambient temperatures. We comment on “hidden moderators”, data quality, and theoretical and methodological consequences of replication studies.
Beyond breathing, the regulation of body temperature-thermoregulation-is one of the most pressing concerns for many animals. A dysregulated body temperature has dire consequences for survival and ...development. Despite the high frequency of social thermoregulation occurring across many species, little is known about the role of social thermoregulation in human (social) psychological functioning. We outline a theory of social thermoregulation and reconsider earlier research on people's expectations of their social world (i.e., attachment) and their prediction of the social world. We provide support and outline a research agenda that includes consequences for individual variation in self-regulatory strategies and capabilities. In our paper, we discuss physiological, neural, and social processes surrounding thermoregulation. Emphasizing social thermoregulation in particular, we appeal to the economy of action principle and the hierarchical organization of human thermoregulatory systems. We close with future directions of a crucial aspect of human functioning: the social regulation of body temperature.
Classical theories on interpersonal relations have long suggested that social interactions are influenced by sensation, such as the experience of warmth. Past empirical work now confirms that ...perceived differences in temperature impact how people form thoughts about relationships. The present work first integrates our knowledge database on brand research with this idea of "grounded social cognition". It then leverages a large sample (total N = 2,552) toward elucidating links between estimates of temperature and positive versus negative evaluations of communal brands. In five studies, the authors have found that thinking about positively (vs. negatively) perceived communal brands leads to heightened temperature estimates. A meta-analysis of the five studies shows a small but consistent effect in this noisy environment, r = .11, 95% CI, .05, .18. Exploratory analyses in Studies 1a and b further suggest that temperature perceptions mediate the (significant) relationship between perceived communality and willingness to purchase from the brand. The authors discuss implications for theory and practice and consider the effects from a Social Baseline Perspective.
Authors rely on a range of devices and techniques to attract and maintain the interest of readers, and to convince them of the merits of the author's point of view. However, when writing a scientific ...article, authors must use these 'persuasive communication devices' carefully. In particular, they must be explicit about the limitations of their work, avoid obfuscation, and resist the temptation to oversell their results. Here we discuss a list of persuasive communication devices and we encourage authors, as well as reviewers and editors, to think carefully about their use.
Among animals, natural selection has resulted in a broad array of behavioural strategies to maintain core body temperature in a relatively narrow range. One important temperature regulation strategy ...is
, which is often done by warming the body together with conspecifics. The literature suggests that the same selection pressures that apply to other animals also apply to humans, producing individual differences in the tendency to socially thermoregulate. We wanted to investigate whether differences in social thermoregulation desires extend to other personality factors in a sample of French students. We conducted an exploratory, hypothesis-generating
project to examine associations between thermoregulation and personality. We used conditional random forests in a training segment of our dataset to identify clusters of variables most likely to be shaped by individual differences to thermoregulate. We used the resulting clusters to fit hypothesis-generating mediation models. After we replicated the relationships in two datasets, personality was not related to social thermoregulation desires, with the exception of attachment avoidance. Attachment avoidance in turn predicted loneliness. This mediation proved robust across all three datasets. As our cross-sectional studies allow limited causal inferences, we suggest investing into prospective studies to understand whether and how social thermoregulation shapes attachment avoidance early in life and loneliness later in life. We also recommend replication of the current relationships in other climates, countries, and age groups.
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