ABSTRACT
In a journal article A. Sapolsky developed the following substantive theory: Some psychiatric patients entertain an unconscious belief in the “cloacal theory of birth” which involves the notions of oral impregnation and anal parturition. Such profligacy of space would ill become an essay one aim of which is to restrain the swelling volume of the psychological literature. The average shared variance of “unrelated” variables can be thought of as a kind of ambient noise level characteristic of the domain. In the case of operational replication, one strives to duplicate exactly just the sampling and experimental procedures given in the first author’s report of his research. In the quite different process of constructive replication, one deliberately avoids imitation of the first author’s methods. The probability values resulting from significance testing can be directly used to measure one’s confidence in expecting a “successful” literal replication only.
