It has been a while,… . COVID-19 is still wreaking havoc but I did find some time to revisit the write-up of a bachelor project from last year by Sarah Dawson. You can find the preprint here. Sarah tried to replicate this (paywalled) paper by Corning and Gondoli (2012). This paper by Corning and Gondoli showed main effects of social comparison, i.e. the degree to which individuals engage in comparison with others, and heightened body image concern on engagement with fat talk as measured with a scale. Fat talk is known to be an important factor for the development of body dissatisfaction, simply put it is (mostly negative) conversations about appearance. In their paper, the authors also found evidence for a statistical interaction between social comparison and heightened body concern on fat talk engagement. Very simply put, the effect of body image concern on fat talk is stronger among those who are high in social comparison, as opposed to those low in social comparison. (Note that you could flip around social comparison and body image concern, and also conclude: the effect of social comparison on fat talk is stronger among those who are high in body image concern, as opposed to those low in body image concern.) Sarah set out to test whether these effects could be replicated in her thesis. She found support for the main effects of social comparison and body image concern, but not for an interaction effect. Later on, spurred on by Sarah’s findings, we conducted another study to replicate both her and Corning and Gondoli’s findings. We again found no evidence for an interaction but did find support for the main effects. However, in this case the interaction effect, would be what some call ‘close’ to a statistical trend. So, what happens when we combine all the data: we find no statistical support for the interaction. In sum, we managed to find support for main effects but not from an interaction. From a practical perspective, that’s perhaps good news, it shows that the effects of social comparison and body image concern do not compound (multiply) when affecting ‘fat talk’, but rather can be seen as additive. It’s been a journey of nearly 3 years but I am very happy to see Sarah’s hard work coming to fruition in this preprint. Now fingers crossed that a journal might also like this,… . It has been a learning curve but solidifies my view that replication projects can make for excellent bachelor thesis projects.