Excess Success in “Ray of hope: Hopelessness increases preferences for brighter lighting”

Abstract

Dong, Huang, and Zhong (2015) report five successful experiments linking brightness perception with the feeling of hopelessness. They argue that a gloomy future is psychologically represented as darkness, not just metaphorically but as an actual perceptual bias. Based on multiple results, they conclude that people who feel hopeless perceive their environment as darker and therefore prefer brighter lighting than controls. Reversely, dim lighting caused participants to feel more hopeless. However, the experiments succeed at a rate much higher than predicted by the magnitude of the reported effects. Based on the reported statistics, the estimated probability of all five experiments being fully successful, if replicated with the same sample sizes, is less than 0.016. This low rate suggests that the original findings are (perhaps unintentionally) the result of questionable research practices or publication bias. Readers should therefore be skeptical about the original results and conclusions. Finally, we discuss how to design future studies to investigate the relationship between hopelessness and brightness.