The influence of mortality and socioeconomic status on risk and delayed rewards: a replication with British participants

• Main Authors: Gillian V. Pepper, D Helen Corby, Rachel Bamber, Holly Smith, Nicky Wong, Daniel Nettle
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: PeerJ Inc. 2017-07-01
• Series: PeerJ
• Subjects: Financial risk; Socioeconomic status; Temporal discounting; Childhood development; Mortality; Priming
• Online Access: https://peerj.com/articles/3580.pdf

Here, we report three attempts to replicate a finding from an influential psychological study (Griskevicius et al., 2011b). The original study found interactions between childhood SES and experimental mortality-priming condition in predicting risk acceptance and delay discounting outcomes. The original study used US student samples. We used British university students (replication 1) and British online samples (replications 2 and 3) with a modified version of the original priming material, which was tailored to make it more credible to a British audience. We did not replicate the interaction between childhood SES and mortality-priming condition in any of our three experiments. The only consistent trend of note was an interaction between sex and priming condition for delay discounting. We note that psychological priming effects are considered fragile and often fail to replicate. Our failure to replicate the original finding could be due to demographic differences in study participants, alterations made to the prime, or other study limitations. However, it is also possible that the previously reported interaction is not a robust or generalizable finding.