Abstract
Dong, Huang, and Zhong (2015) report five successful experiments linking brightness perception with the feeling of hopelessness. They argue that a gloomy future is psychologically represented as darkness, not just metaphorically but as an actual perceptual bias. Based on multiple results, they conclude that people who feel hopeless perceive their environment as darker and therefore prefer brighter lighting than controls. Reversely, dim lighting caused participants to feel more hopeless. However, the experiments succeed at a rate much higher than predicted by the magnitude of the reported effects. Based on the reported statistics, the estimated probability of all five experiments being fully successful, if replicated with the same sample sizes, is less than 0.016. This low rate suggests that the original findings are (perhaps unintentionally) the result of questionable research practices or publication bias. Readers should therefore be skeptical about the original results and conclusions. Finally, we discuss how to design future studies to investigate the relationship between hopelessness and brightness.
Highlights
Dong, Huang, and Zhong (2015) report five successful experiments linking brightness perception with the feeling of hopelessness
The Test for Excess Success (TES) is one way of identifying excess success in multi-study publications (Francis, 2013b; Ioannidis & Trikalinos, 2007; Schimmack, 2012). Reports from such analyses can themselves be subject to publication bias (Simonsohn, 2012, 2013), selective reporting of excess success is not a problem as long as the conclusions from the TES are restricted to the analyzed set of data
We suggest that new studies on the relationship between hopelessness and brightness perception should be designed with these principles in mind
Summary
Excess Success in “Ray of hope: Hopelessness Increases Preferences for Brighter Lighting”. To argue for a specific effect of hopelessness on brightness perception, Dong et al indicated that it is important that brightness judgments did not differ across the other emotion conditions All of these tests should be included when estimating the probability that a study will be successful. Our computed power of 0.562 should be considered an overestimate of the success rate of the full set of experimental tests In their supplemental material, Dong et al reported that Study 4 had a post-hoc power of 0.99, which is much larger than our estimated value of 0.562. When a conclusion depends on multiple tests, replication success (power) depends primarily not on the strongest but on the weakest finding
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