Richard Klein
Richard A. Klein is the first author of the original Many Labs project, which took thirteen well-known psychological effects and ran every one of them again in thirty-six separate samples on more than six thousand people. The sunk cost item was among the ten effects that held up consistently, and it came out slightly larger in the repeat than in the original study, which is unusual enough to be worth saying.
Who they are
Many Labs belongs to the broader effort, usually called the replication crisis, to find out which published psychological findings survive being tested again by other people. The design is the point: instead of one laboratory repeating one study, dozens of laboratories run the same agreed procedure, so that a failure cannot be waved away as a local fluke and a success cannot be a single lucky sample.
No current post is recorded here.
Key papers
Klein, R. A., et al. (2014). "Investigating variation in replicability: a 'Many Labs' replication project", Social Psychology, 45(3), 142 to 152. First author. Thirteen effects, thirty-six samples, 6,344 participants. Full text read in the vault on 2026-09-02. The sunk cost effect replicated at a small size, slightly larger than the original, and it did not vary meaningfully between countries: it showed up at about the same size in Poland and in Virginia.
Key ideas
Two things belong in the same breath whenever this is quoted. The effect replicated, in the direction predicted, and slightly larger than the original. It is also small, and only about half of the thirty-six individual samples found it on their own.
The item tested is not the one people think it is. The version used was the football-ticket vignette, which descends from Thaler in 1980 and 1985 by way of a 2009 paper by Oppenheimer, Meyvis and Davidenko. Hal Arkes and Catherine Blumer's theatre-season study, the one everybody actually describes, has never been directly repeated.
That distinction is the most useful thing on this page. "It replicated" and "the famous study replicated" are different statements, and only the first one is true here.
Concepts on this site
Sources
- Klein, R. A., et al. (2014). Social Psychology, 45(3), 142 to 152. Read in full 2026-09-02; the exact figures are recorded on the sunk cost page.
- Vault record, 2026-09-11. No current affiliation verified.