Recently, Beall and Tracy (2013; henceforth BT) sought to demonstrate that women prefer to wear red or pink when they are at peak fertility. This result is consistent with the theory that men are sexually attracted to the color red.
Even before it appeared in print, the BT study attracted a great deal of attention. Specifically, prominent statistician Andrew Gelman critiqued the BT study on his blog, and a discussion with BT ensued; the entire exchange is summarized online at the following two urls: (1) http://andrewgelman.com/2013/07/24/too-good-to-be-true-the-scientific-mass-production-of-spurious-statistical-significance/ and (2) http://andrewgelman.com/2013/07/31/response-by-jessica-tracy-and-alec-beall-to-my-criticism-of-their-paper/.
Gelman’s main point of critique was that the results could have been analyzed in many ways, and that the findings partly reflect researcher degrees of freedom. BT argued against this, but in the end such arguments can only be settled conclusively by empirical means. Hence our goal is to replicate the BT study using a strictly confirmatory, preregistrered experiment that excludes all researcher degrees of freedom (e.g., Wagenmakers et al., 2012).