Psychology› Social Psychology› Bullying, Victimization, and Aggression

Alcohol and aggression — Alcohol cues (without consumption) priming aggressive thoughts (Bartholow & Heinz 2006)

Submitted 2026-10-22

Field: Psychology › Social PsychologyType: Couldn't replicate a published resultArea: alcohol and aggressionTarget: Alcohol cues (without consumption) priming aggressive thoughts (Bartholow & Heinz 2006)Stage: replication

Hypothesis

Merely seeing alcohol-related pictures, without drinking, would make aggressive words more accessible, as Bartholow and Heinz (2006) reported.

What failed

In a lexical decision task pairing aggressive and neutral words with alcohol-related or neutral pictures, the expected effect did not replicate: the only effect was a main effect of word type, with neutral words detected faster than aggressive ones.

Broken assumption

Alcohol cues alone, without consumption, increase the accessibility of aggressive thoughts.

Why

The authors attribute the outcome to study limitations, and report that faulty design choices also made the planned analysis of gender-stereotype endorsement impossible.

From the published paper: Leboeuf et al. Journal of Trial and Error, 2020. ↗CC BY

Research ideas from this failure

Unvetted lead — read the papers

New hypotheses this failure suggests, each with a crucial experiment, a rival explanation of the original result, and the papers it rests on. Written by AI from paper titles and abstracts found on OpenAlex (and Europe PMC, for life and health sciences).

Related failures (1)

Matched on shared genes, mechanisms and ways of failing as well as wording. Each shows why it matched — treat these as leads rather than verdicts.

visual perception and social cognitionBreaking continuous flash suppression advantage for trustworthy, non-dominant facesdifferent research area
Faces perceived as less dominant and more trustworthy reach awareness faster because of their social-emotional meaning.
Dominance- and untrustworthiness-related slowing replicated for upright faces but was equally strong for inverted faces, where social characteristics are hard to read; the reported correlation between that slowing and self-reported propensity to trust did not replicate; and the dominance effect persisted when only the eye region was shown, inverted and with reversed contrast polarity, conditions in which the traits were no longer discernible. Experiment 3 reproduced this under a preregistered protocol.
Why it matched: failed the same way: Held in the model species, not beyond it

Links in published research

Where this experiment's genes are known to matter outside its own research area, and the papers behind those links. Sources: Open Targets Platform and Europe PMC.