2025-06-26 –, Second floor 214
Construal Level Theory (CLT) posits a positive, reciprocal relationship between psychological distance and construal level (abstract vs. concrete). Despite a sizable literature, the evidence might not be as strong as it appears due to low power and publication bias. The goal of this empirical audit was to perform a large-scale replication of a randomly selected set of CLT studies with larger sample sizes (2.5 times the original sample sizes, total N = 6513; Simonsohn, 2015). We replicated 20 published studies, sampled through our comprehensive search and selection procedure. Nineteen out of the 20 studies failed to replicate, with average effect size less than r = .10, which was significantly smaller than the original studies. The results suggest that if the originally reported effects do indeed exist, that the original studies were inadequately powered to detect them.
