situations at least once among studies consistent with or replicating the original 5-HTTLPR-by-stressful life event interaction, and such indirect replications can have a high false positive rate. Second, and most importantly, Karg et al. used extremely liberal inclusion criteria, analyzing many indirect replications that we either classified as novel studies or excluded completely. Thus, the findings of Karg et al. and the findings we present here recapitulate one another; almost all novel studies (our review) and indirect replications (the Karg et al. meta-analysis) are positive, whereas most direct replications are not. This suggests that positive meta-analytic findings become more likely as study heterogeneity increases. Notably, this is exactly the opposite of what would be expected if the original results were true. Stricter replication attempts should be more likely, not less likely, to be significant. Rather than interpreting the fail-safe ratio as evidence that most cG×E findings are true, this ratio might be better interpreted as providing a rough estimate of how large the “file drawer problem” is in the cG×E field.
