CAN A THEORY BE ESTABLISHED BY A LARGE NUMBER OF EXPERIMENTS THAT CAN’T BE REPLICATED? Professor Nisbett argues that even if many individual studies have not been replicable, a large number of studies in different experimental contexts which support an underlying theory can establish the theory. He cites the theory (or principle) that “minimal cues, which ought to have no part in determining your behavior, do have an impact.” “The general point is that some minimal seeming cue, which gets into the stream of behavior and has an impact—we have hundreds of those studies, many individual ones that are not highly replicable.”
He says: “You give people an orange pen to answer a consumer survey about what their preferences are, and they’ll circle more of the orange products. Would you obtain that in all circumstances? I don’t know whether you would or not.” However, a failure to replicate in one or even a number of similar studies “wouldn’t shake your faith in the idea that minimal cues, which ought to have no part in determining your behavior, do have an impact.”