"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 ...