The Broken Escalator; Or, Can You Ever Really Retract a Paper?
It’s a clear, curious, irresistible finding. In a study published last March in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology,, researchers tracked donations to the Salvation Army from mall shoppers who had just taken the up escalator versus those who had just stepped off the down. They found that more than twice as many of the recently elevated gave money (16 percent compared with 7 percent).
Articles about the study appeared in Scientific American, New Scientist, and multiple other outlets, each with the obligatory escalator stock photo like the one above. Even though the finding is pretty recent, it’s showed up in several books, including Get Lucky: How to Put Planned Serendipity to Work for You and Your Business and Brainfluence: 100 Ways to Persuade and Convince Consumers With Neuromarketing.
The lead author of the study is Lawrence Sanna, who resigned in May from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor after another social psychologist, Uri Simonsohn, raised questions about the escalator study and other papers by Sanna. According to Nature, Sanna has requested that that paper and two others be retracted.
But retracting the paper doesn’t mean it will go away. It will probably continue to pop up in Google Scholar searches, just like the papers of the disgraced psychologist Diederik Stapel. Those news articles will still get stumbled on, forwarded, Tweeted. Unsuspecting readers will pick up those books and read aloud the passage about the incredible escalator trick to their spouses. There may be Salvation Army bell ringers standing hopefully at the tops of escalators next Christmas season, counting on the magic of science.