Hypothesis
Mortality cues interact with childhood socioeconomic status to shift risk acceptance and delay discounting, as found in US student samples.
What failed
Three replications, one with British university students and two with British online samples, using priming material modified to be credible to a British audience, found no interaction between childhood socioeconomic status and mortality-priming condition for either outcome; the only consistent trend was an interaction between sex and priming condition for delay discounting.
Broken assumption
The mortality-priming by childhood-SES interaction is robust enough to appear outside US student samples.
Why
The authors list demographic differences, their alterations to the prime and other study limitations as possible causes, while noting that priming effects are considered fragile and that the original interaction may not be robust or generalisable.
From the published paper: Pepper et al. PeerJ, 2017. ↗CC BY