Introducing the 'Replications in Experimental Philosophy' Webpage

As many of you may know, there has been a huge storm of controversy recently regarding the issue of replication in social psychology. (See here, here and here.) The main worry is that information about whether or not an effect has been replicated in further studies is not widely available. Thus, it may happen that an effect just happens to come out one time due to a statistical fluke, then is published in a major journal and achieves tons of acclaim... but no one ever gets a chance to hear about all of the subsequent studies that fail to find it. 

To head off any parallel worries within experimental philosophy, Christian Mott has put together the webpage Replications in Experimental Philosophy. Try taking a quick look. You can scroll down to see the studies that are most important to your own work, then check to see whether anyone has tried to replicate those studies and, if so, how the results came out. 

One thing that has been especially striking to me about work in this area so far has been the really positive and generous attitude that experimental philosophers have taken to the issue of replication. In some cases, experimental philosophers have found that particular effects fail to replicate, but in all the cases that I know of, they have approached the issue in a spirit of genuine scientific curiosity -- not trying to 'get' the philosopher whose work they are testing, but truly engaged in an attempt to get to the bottom of the relevant intellectual issues. (I have gotten a chance to experience this at first hand: one of my own effects seems not to be replicating, but the philosophers who failed to replicate it appear to be motivated entirely by a spirit of disinterested truth-seeking.) As our work on this stuff continues, let's hope we can hold on to our reputation for virtue! 

Anyway, Christian would love to hear about further replications, whether published or unpublished. So if you know of any replications that aren't already up on his page, just write them out in the comments section of this post (using the same format he has been using so far), and he will go ahead and add them in. Feel free also to include any thoughts you might have about what the results of the replication might be telling us about any larger issues.

Comments

[Angel Pinillos]

Pinillos, N. Angel. (2012) "Knowledge, Experiments and Practical Interests". in Jessica Brown & MIkkel Gerken (eds.), New Essays On Knowledge Ascriptions. Oxford University Press.

Gave evidence that attributions of knowledge are sensitive to practical interests. Subjects asked how much evidence is required (how many times does an agent have to proofread their paper) for that agent to know (there are no typos in her paper). In low stakes Median=2, high stakes Median=5.

These results replicated in the following (though these authors disagree with the conclusion I draw).

Buckwalter, W. (forthcoming). "The Mystery of Stakes and Error in Ascriber Intuitions." In James Beebe (ed.), Advances in Experimental Epistemology. Continuum.

Wesley Buckwalter & Jonathan Schaffer, "Knowledge, Stakes, and Mistakes."

NOTE: In a forthcoming paper (with Shawn Simpson) "Experimental Evidence in support of Anti-Intellectualism about Knowledge", we replicate the experiments Buckwalter and Schaffer use to criticize Pinillos. Though through another experiment, we argue that their criticism is not warranted.

[Christian Mott]

Thanks Ángel! I have put up the replications of "Knowledge, Experiments and Practical Interests," but I can't find a copy of your forthcoming paper online. Would you mind posting the replicated results so I can add them?