David C. Vaidis

By rewarding speed, volume, and coherent positive narratives, traditional publishing incentivizes questionable scientific practices and analytic flexibility. The latter especially contributes to blurring the distinction between exploration and confirmation, which inflates the apparent strength of confirmatory claims. This systemic issue has gone unchecked for decades, leaving the scientific community with a body of scholarly literature that is unreliable and lacking validity. Registered Reports (RRs) address problematic publishing practices by requiring a priori registration of confirmatory tests, which is peer-reviewed before the research begins (stage 1). The editorial acceptance of a stage 1 plan establishes a commitment to publication regardless of research outcomes. Publication remains, nonetheless, contingent on a second peer review and editorial scrutiny (stage 2) to verify that the approved plan was followed, all deviations were transparently disclosed and justified, confirmatory and exploratory claims are clearly delineated, and the integrity of the design was maintained. Meta-scientific comparisons indicate that RRs reduce outcome-based publication bias and improve methodological rigor without compromising perceived novelty. By making accepted RR protocols and their review history citable research outputs, RRs also strengthen recognition for peer-review work. In this perspective, we argue that RRs should become the primary mode of confirmatory publication moving forward.

Cognitive dissonance, traditionally conceptualized as a fundamental psychological process involving discomfort from inconsistent cognitions, may vary across cultures. These variations could be attributed to self-construal, or how individuals define themselves in relation to others. Although previous cross-cultural research has predominantly used the free-choice paradigm, significant concerns have been raised regarding its procedural validity and the robustness of its findings. To address this issue, this registered report presents secondary analyses of a large-scale international dataset. We investigated the moderating role of cultural variables on dissonance effects within the induced-compliance paradigm across 18 countries (N = 3,804). We hypothesized that dissonance effects would be stronger for participants with higher individual-level self-construal scores (H1), in more individualistic countries (H2), and in countries with higher country-level self-construal scores (H3). Our results did not support these hypotheses, suggesting that cultural moderation may not generalize to the induced-compliance paradigm. We discuss the necessity of reassessing the procedure’s reliability and clarifying the theoretical role of choice.

Commercial academic publishing alongside academia’s strong focus on rewarding novelty has led to the neglect of research verification (e.g., reproduction, robustness, and replication studies). Scholar-led publishing, which focuses on rigour rather than the surprising nature of findings, has been proposed as one alternative. We present Replication Research (R2) as an example of a university-hosted, diamond open access community journal. We discuss the process of working with and for the community with the help of a research library and explain how open documentation and inclusive academic exchange can help align the incentive structure with our scientific ideals. The newly founded journal promotes investigations of previously published claims, which we refer to as repeatability research. We discuss the prerequisites for founding R2, the timeline from inception of the idea to its first publications, the core principles guiding our work, the mechanisms that ensure quality assurance, and the conceptual, technical, and practical challenges that we faced. Depending on the success of Replication Research, this case study may serve either as a blueprint or a cautionary tale for other researchers trying to shift academic incentives and the publication culture.

Commercial academic publishing alongside academia’s strong focus on rewarding novelty has led to the neglect of research verification (e.g., reproduction, robustness, and replication studies). Scholar-led publishing, which focuses on rigour rather than the surprising nature of findings, has been proposed as one alternative. We present Replication Research (R2) as an example of a university-hosted, diamond open access community journal. We discuss the process of working with and for the community with the help of a research library and explain how open documentation and inclusive academic exchange can help align the incentive structure with our scientific ideals. The newly founded journal promotes investigations of previously published claims, which we refer to as repeatability research. We discuss the prerequisites for founding R2, the timeline from inception of the idea to its first publications, the core principles guiding our work, the mechanisms that ensure quality assurance, and the conceptual, technical, and practical challenges that we faced. Depending on the success of Replication Research, this case study may serve either as a blueprint or a cautionary tale for other researchers trying to shift academic incentives and the publication culture.

Cognitive dissonance, traditionally conceptualized as a fundamental psychological process involving discomfort from inconsistent cognitions, may vary across cultures. These variations could be attributed to self-construal, or how individuals define themselves in relation to others. Although previous cross-cultural research has predominantly used the free-choice paradigm, significant concerns have been raised regarding its procedural validity and the robustness of its findings. To address this issue, this registered report presents secondary analyses of a large-scale international dataset. We investigated the moderating role of cultural variables on dissonance effects within the induced-compliance paradigm across 18 countries (N = 3,804). We hypothesized that dissonance effects would be stronger for participants with higher individual-level self-construal scores (H1), in more individualistic countries (H2), and in countries with higher country-level self-construal scores (H3). Our results did not support these hypotheses, suggesting that cultural moderation may not generalize to the induced-compliance paradigm. We discuss the necessity of reassessing the procedure’s reliability and clarifying the theoretical role of choice.

Motivated reasoning is commonly invoked to explain cognitive biases, yet the paradigm faces growing scrutiny. In this article, we synthesize recent conceptual and methodological critiques to argue that these limitations stem from a common root: the progressive dilution of Kunda’s (1990) original distinction between directional and accuracy goals. This conceptual drift has reduced motivated reasoning to mere biased reasoning (Saucier et al., 2025), leading to empirical practices that infer motivational states from outcome biases without directly manipulating or measuring the underlying goals, thereby creating an observational equivalence problem (Druckman & McGrath, 2019; Tappin et al., 2020). Consequently, current methodological refinements fall short of resolving these ambiguities. We argue that valid inference requires explicitly disentangling the nature of the motivation (directional vs. accuracy) from its intensity. To move the field forward, we advocate for a new conceptual framework—integrating Nature and Intensity as orthogonal dimensions—to serve as a theoretical anchor for future research. Such a paradigm would allow reliable discrimination between directional and accuracy goals through converging evidence from behavioral, self-report, and physiological indicators, ultimately re-establishing the theoretical coherence and empirical validity of motivated reasoning research.

Women are greatly underrepresented in positions of political leadership around the world. In seeking to explain this underrepresentation, some researchers have pointed to people’s tendencies to stereotype leaders as more similar to men than women as these tendencies can support the belief that women are unsuited to leadership. This project aimed to test whether a subtle linguistic intervention was able to ameliorate this gender bias in political leadership stereotypes across different languages and national contexts (country N = 42, sample N = 22,995). Specifically, this project examined whether gender fair language (e.g., the use of paired pronouns ‘he or she’) can reduce the tendency for people to stereotype political leaders as more similar to men than women. To increase the rigor with which these stereotypes were measured, this project complemented the dominant ‘cheap talk’ measure of personal stereotype content with a novel incentivised community measure of this content. As expected, participants stereotyped political leaders as more similar to men than women; this pattern was stronger on the incentivised measure of community stereotypes. Unexpectedly, there was no evidence that paired pronouns reduced this bias (there was weak exploratory evidence that paired nouns increased participants’ tendencies to stereotype political leaders as more similar to women). This project suggests that the ability of gender fair language interventions to ameliorate gender bias in the political leadership domain may be limited.

Political leadership positions are dominated by men. Arguably the most visible of a society’s positions of power, these positions may be important symbols of women’s ability to lead. If so, levels of female political representation within a society should shape its stereotypes of women’s suitability for political leadership. This project will test this possibility by conducting a secondary analysis of a dataset that measured the stereotypes of women, men and political leaders in 44 countries covering six continents (Nsample = 23,256). Specifically, we will test whether, as a country’s representation of women in political leadership increases, there is a greater increase in the congruence of that country’s stereotypes of political leaders and women than in the congruence of that country’s stereotypes of political leaders and men. We will also conduct exploratory analyses to identity whether other socio-ecological and cultural variables correlate with cross-national heterogeneity in the content and congruence of these stereotypes. This project will shed light on the way in which macro-level variables can shape micro-level gendered leadership beliefs.