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Browse the failure-mode index

302 real negative results, null findings, and replication failures in Social Sciences. Search the index →

WASTE indexes published research — it does not host or republish full papers. Each entry is a metadata record compiled from open scholarly databases; the abstract is shown in full only where the paper is openly licensed, otherwise a short excerpt under fair use. Classifications are automated and approximate.

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessSocial Sciences

Threatened suicide and baiting crowd formation: a replication and extension of Mann (1981)

Christine M. Smith, Paulina Dzik, Errin Fornicola · 2019 · Social Influence

Using the lens of Deindividuation Theory, Leon Mann explored the formation of baiting crowds in a small sample of public suicides/suicide attempts. Instead of attempting to prevent the suicide, baiting crowds encourage the victim to jump. Our aim was to replicate Mann's study with a larger more diverse sample of suicide attempts and a broadened theoretical lens (Frustration-Aggression). Using ProQuest, we identified 152 public suicide attempts reported in English language newspapers and failed to replicate Mann’s findings. Rather, baiting crowd formation was associated with variables that incr

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessSocial Sciences

Good luck, bad luck, and ambiguity aversion

Briony D. Pulford, Poonam Gill · 2014 · Judgment and Decision Making

We report a series of experiments investigating the influence of feeling lucky or unlucky on people’s choice of known-risk or ambiguous options using the traditional Ellsberg Urns decision-making task. We induced a state of feeling lucky or unlucky in subjects by using a rigged wheel-of-fortune game, which just missed either the bankrupt or the jackpot outcome. In the first experiment a large reversal of the usual ambiguity aversion effect was shown, indicating that feeling lucky made subjects significantly more ambiguity seeking than usual. However, this effect failed to replicate in five ref

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