Methodological choices have predictable consequences in replicating studies on motivation to think: Commentary on Ebersole et al. (2016)
Abstract Ebersole et al. (2016) aimed to conduct a direct replication of Cacioppo, Petty, and Morris (1983, Study 1) looking for a Need for Cognition X Argument Quality interaction on attitudes in response to a persuasive message. Although this effect has been replicated in the literature a good number of times, Ebersole et al. did not obtain it. We attribute their failure to the fact that in their replication effort they used neither of the original independent variables and indeed changed them substantially. Furthermore, they made some other methodological changes to the procedure used in the original study that subsequent research has plausibly suggested would reduce the likelihood of finding the effect. We conclude that because of all of these methodological changes as well as their failure to pretest the impact of these modifications, the replication effort is uninformative.