The Replication Scorecard

Module 1 promised this table twice — once in the opening lesson's methodology section, once at the end of Lever Three — and this is it. The three lever lessons taught each mechanism embedded in its causal story, which is the right way to learn a mechanism but a slow way to check one mid-deal. This lesson strips the story back out and leaves only the lookup: mechanism, lever, status, and the one line you need to remember about why.

Use it the way you'd use a nutrition label, not a footnote: before you rely on a tactic in a live deal, or before you let a tactic into copy, a deck, or a training doc, check its row here. If it's tagged CASUALTY, the tactic doesn't get taught, cited, or leaned on as if the mechanism behind it were real — full stop, regardless of how intuitively right it feels, because "feels right" is itself the heuristic-substitution failure mode this course spends Module 1 warning you about.

#1. The full table

#2. The three casualties to purge

Three claims show up across most mechanism-citing sales material, and this course removes all three rather than repeating them with a caveat attached:

"Willpower is a depletable tank — wear the buyer down, or close reps at the end of a long day." This is ego depletion, and it failed at scale: a 23-lab preregistered replication (Hagger & Chatzisarantis, 2016, N=2,141) found approximately zero effect, and a 36-lab replication designed with the original theorist's own input (Vohs et al., 2021, N=3,531) found d=0.06 — statistically null. What survives in its place is real and already in this library: concurrent cognitive load (§11) — a mind occupied by something else defaults to the easy option, which is resource competition, not a draining battery. Do not cite depletion. Do cite load.

"Build rapport to release oxytocin, the trust molecule." The founding trust-game result (Kosfeld et al., 2005) failed multiple independent replications; Nave, Camerer & McCullough (2015) found the effect not robust, and a large registered report subsequently found no meaningful effect of intranasal oxytocin on trusting behavior at all. What survives in its place is real and already in this library: affect labeling (§13) — literally naming a buyer's emotion measurably lowers their threat response, on a fully independent evidence base (Lieberman et al., 2007). Do not cite oxytocin. Do cite labeling.

"Prime them subconsciously — plant words or images below conscious notice and shift their behavior." The broader social-priming literature that this claim descends from collapsed under systematic replication attempts through the 2010s; the paradigm cases (words associated with old age making people walk more slowly, and similar) did not hold up. Unlike the two claims above, no numbered mechanism in this library replaces it, because there isn't a legitimate sales-relevant version of subliminal priming worth teaching — it's purged wholesale, not narrowed to a defensible core.

The shape to notice across all three: in two of the three cases, the underlying behavior people were reaching for — reduce the buyer's resistance, build genuine trust — is completely legitimate, and this library teaches a real mechanism that gets you there. What's false is specifically the story about why the behavior works. A course that keeps citing willpower or oxytocin to justify a real behavior is laundering dead science whether or not it means to, and the fix is never to drop the behavior — it's to name the mechanism that's actually driving it.

#What carries forward

Module 2 gave you 22 mechanisms and, now, one table to check any of them against. Module 3 does something different with the same material: it takes the named frameworks you've probably already encountered — SPIN, Challenger, MEDDPICC, JOLT, and others — and shows that each one is a bundle of the mechanisms you just learned, wearing a brand name and a trademark training program. Once you can see the mechanisms inside a framework, you can use the parts that fit your deal without buying the certification, and you can tell in advance exactly where each framework will break.