No Evidence That Experiencing Physical Warmth Promotes Interpersonal Warmth
Chabris and colleagues attempted to replicate both of the physical warmth experiments, the coffee cup and the therapeutic pad, and their write-up is as much about method as about the result. They note that the original effects were reported as large, from samples of forty-one and fifty-three people, with results that only just reached statistical significance, a combination that is itself a warning sign, since a genuinely large effect in a small sample should produce a comfortable margin rather than a marginal one. Their replications used more than triple the sample sizes, ran in field settings and were double-blind. Both produced effects indistinguishable from zero. Their Bayesian analysis indicates the data support the absence of an effect substantially better than its presence, which is a stronger statement than a failure to find one. This vault cites it as the standard example of a striking published finding that does not survive proper testing, and of how to read a small sample with a large claim.
Chabris and colleagues attempted to replicate both of the physical warmth experiments, the coffee cup and the therapeutic pad, and their write-up is as much about method as about the result. They note that the original effects were reported as large, from samples of forty-one and fifty-three people, with results that only just reached statistical significance, a combination that is itself a warning sign, since a genuinely large effect in a small sample should produce a comfortable margin rather than a marginal one. Their replications used more than triple the sample sizes, ran in field settings and were double-blind. Both produced effects indistinguishable from zero. Their Bayesian analysis indicates the data support the absence of an effect substantially better than its presence, which is a stronger statement than a failure to find one. This vault cites it as the standard example of a striking published finding that does not survive proper testing, and of how to read a small sample with a large claim.
Written from the abstract, OpenAlex.
What our sources record
Reproduced as it was written when this source was checked, figures and all.
Chabris, C. F., Heck, P. R., Mandart, J., Benjamin, D. J., & Simons, D. J. (2019). "No evidence that experiencing physical warmth promotes interpersonal warmth." Social Psychology, 50(2), 127-132. Double-blind field replications at N = 128 and N = 177; original r = .28 and .31, replication r = -.03 and .02.
Where we use it
- What Forty-One Participants Buys, Why We Look
Reliability of this reference
The link below was matched against the publisher's record on title, first author and year, and all three agree.
The source
https://doi.org/10.1027/1864-9335/a000361
DOI: 10.1027/1864-9335/a000361