The rules of the house
The pitch of this museum: reality, properly cited, is more astonishing than anything made up. These are the rules that keep us honest.
Primary sources or it didn't happen. Every exhibit cites the original paper (with a DOI link) plus at least one replication, review, or meta-analysis. Where the modern record disagrees with the famous version, the plaque says so — see the Framing Clinic's "robust but smaller" note or the Sunk Cost Simulator's contested badge.
Original stimuli only. The scenes in the Change Blindness Gallery were drawn for this museum; the Stroop word set is our own; the scenarios are retold in our words from the published methods. We don't reproduce licensed test batteries or copyrighted stimulus films.
Honest failure. Effects that failed to replicate are not hidden — they get their own wing. "We were wrong" is a finding.
well-replicated
The effect has survived direct replications, ideally multi-lab ones (e.g. Many Labs), and/or consistent meta-analyses. This is as close to bedrock as psychology gets. (Stroop, change blindness, anchoring, framing.)
contested
The classic effect exists in the literature, but rigorous modern work finds it weaker, rarer, or dependent on conditions — or there's serious debate about whether it's a bias at all. The plaque shows both sides. (Sunk cost.)
failed-replication
Large, pre-registered replications found the headline effect missing or negligible. Kept on display in the Contested Wing as specimens of how the field corrects itself. (Social priming, ego depletion, power posing.)
Every exhibit sends a handful of anonymous aggregate events ("one more visitor chose Programme A in the loss frame") to counters on this site. Values like reaction times and estimates are binned in your browser before anything is sent; there are no accounts, ids, cookies, or fingerprints. The aggregates power the "the crowd so far" reveals and the live stats board — a folk replication dataset, clearly labelled as such.
Eventually these citation lists may carry bookshop affiliate links (the references paying the rent, on-brand for a museum). If that day comes, it will be disclosed right here in one plain sentence.
Human Machinery is a minomobi property. The whole site is static except the counters; it works with JavaScript disabled everywhere except inside the games themselves.