Decision Sciences› General Decision Sciences› Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics

Judgment and decision making — Protection effect in magical thinking (Tykocinski 2008)

Submitted 2026-10-22

Field: Decision Sciences › General Decision SciencesType: Couldn't replicate a published resultArea: judgment and decision makingTarget: Protection effect in magical thinking (Tykocinski 2008)Stage: replication

Hypothesis

Reminding people of a precaution they have already taken makes them judge the related risk as less likely (the protection effect), alongside the tempting-fate effect.

What failed

Three direct replication attempts of Tykocinski's protection-effect experiment did not reproduce the effect, while two replications of the Risen and Gilovich tempting-fate experiment did reproduce theirs.

Broken assumption

Recalling a precaution taken reliably lowers people's perceived risk of the related bad outcome.

Why

The abstract does not offer a reason for the non-replication.

From the published paper: Wolferen et al. Judgment and Decision Making, 2013. ↗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.

psycholinguisticsPartner-specific memory associations in picture namingdifferent research area
Speakers would name a pictured object faster in front of a person they had earlier linked with that object's name, as Horton (2007, Experiment 1) found.
Three experiments designed to replicate and extend Horton's Experiment 1 did not reproduce the effect.
Why it matched: similar wording · 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.