"Troubling Oddities" In A Social Psychology Data Set

A potential case of data manipulation has been uncovered in a psychology paper. The suspect article is 'Why money meanings matter in decisions to donate time and money' (2013) from psychologists Promothesh Chatterjee, Randall L. Rose, and Jayati Sinha. This study fell into the genre of 'social priming', specifically 'money priming'. The authors reported that making people think about cash reduces their willingness to help others, while thinking of credit cards has the opposite effect. Now, a critical group of researchers led by Hal Pashler allege "troubling oddities" in the data. Pashler et al.'s paper is followed by three responses, one from each of the original authors (Chatterjee, Rose, Sinha), and finally by a summing-up from the critics. Pashler et al. recently published a failure to replicate several money priming effects. Pashler et al. focus on Chatterjee et al.'s Study #3, the last of the three experiments reported in the paper; they report having some concerns about the other two studies as well, but they don't go into much detail. The "odd" data in Study #3 comes from a word completion task. In this paradigm, participants are shown 'word stems' and asked to complete them with the first word they think of. e.g. the stem might be BR___ and I being a neuroscientist might write BRAIN; you might be feeling hungry so you might write BRUNCH. Pashler et al. say that 20 participants (out of 94 who completed Study #3) gave a striking similar pattern of word-stem responses. Specifically, these 20 participants tended to give the same answers to nine 'filler' items, which were chosen to not be affected by the money vs. credit card priming. Here are the raw responses: