The Psychologist’s Green Thumb

Abstract

Abstract The “psychologist’s green thumb” refers to the argument that an experimenter needs an indeterminate set of skills to successfully replicate an effect. This argument is sometimes invoked by psychological researchers to explain away failures of independent replication attempts of their work. In this article, I assess the psychologist’s green thumb as a candidate explanation for individual replication failure and argue that it is potentially costly for psychology as a field. I also present other, more likely reasons for these replication failures. I conclude that appealing to a psychologist’s green thumb is not a convincing explanation for replication failure.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 1 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.