The influence of mortality and socioeconomic status on risk and delayed rewards: a replication with British participants.

Gillian V Pepper,Nicky Wong,Daniel Nettle,Rachel Bamber,D Helen Corby,Holly Smith

doi:10.7717/peerj.3580

Abstract

Here, we report three attempts to replicate a finding from an influential psychological study (Griskevicius et al., 2011b). The original study found interactions between childhood SES and experimental mortality-priming condition in predicting risk acceptance and delay discounting outcomes. The original study used US student samples. We used British university students (replication 1) and British online samples (replications 2 and 3) with a modified version of the original priming material, which was tailored to make it more credible to a British audience. We did not replicate the interaction between childhood SES and mortality-priming condition in any of our three experiments. The only consistent trend of note was an interaction between sex and priming condition for delay discounting. We note that psychological priming effects are considered fragile and often fail to replicate. Our failure to replicate the original finding could be due to demographic differences in study participants, alterations made to the prime, or other study limitations. However, it is also possible that the previously reported interaction is not a robust or generalizable finding.

Highlights

In recent years scientists in fields ranging from biomedicine to psychology have become increasingly concerned with the difficulties of replicating findings that are often assumed to be universal and reproducible (Cesario, 2014; Ferguson & Mann, 2014; Moonesinghe, Khoury & Janssens, 2007)
To address the possibilities that we did not replicate the original findings in our first two attempts either because we had altered the prime, or because the prime was less credible to British participants, we collected additional data during replication 3: after the outcome variables had been recorded, participants in the mortality-priming condition were presented with the prime-piloting questions, described under ‘Priming material’
In models controlling for childhood socioeconomic status (SES), the extent to which participants reported finding the prime convincing had no effect on their risk or delay discounting scores

Summary

Introduction

In recent years scientists in fields ranging from biomedicine to psychology have become increasingly concerned with the difficulties of replicating findings that are often assumed to be universal and reproducible (Cesario, 2014; Ferguson & Mann, 2014; Moonesinghe, Khoury & Janssens, 2007). How to cite this article Pepper et al (2017), The influence of mortality and socioeconomic status on risk and delayed rewards: a replication with British participants. The same mortality-risk prime led participants who grew up wealthier to prefer future rewards to immediate ones in a lab-based delay discounting task. Those who grew up in poorer environments preferred more immediate rewards after mortality priming. For both risk acceptance and delay discounting, there were interactions between priming condition and childhood socioeconomic status in predicting the outcome. Using only one adapted prime, rather than two, meant that our replication was closer to the original study

Methods

Results

Conclusion