Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting -- the problem may be a misapplication of funnel plots for metaanalysis. I'm not sure what theta is representing and only skimmed the paper, but especially in social scenarios and across social papers, seems unlikely to assume the same distributions and parameters across tasks & populations. Sometimes comes down to 'is there any effect??' and sometimes a precise notion of effect size in a lucky/clever spe…
Both the authors of this study and meta-analysts generally have followup responses and other diagnostics and models that work under degraded assumptions, so I don't think it makes a ton of sense to respond to "this is the absolute most introductory example of why this kind of intuition works" with "it doesn't work in case". There are a variety of ways to think through what data looks like under publication bias or no…
it's another to reject the underlying phenomena because of metaanalysis.