> There are a lot of things that can affect mouse behavior, including possibly pheromones/smell of the experimenter. I am guessing that behavior patterns such a

> There are a lot of things that can affect mouse behavior, including possibly pheromones/smell of the experimenter. I am guessing that behavior patterns such as anxiety behavior can be socially reinforced as well, which could affect results. I can could come up with another dozen factors if I had to. Were mice tested one at a time? How many mice were tested? Time of day? Gut microbiota? If the effect isn't reproducible without the sun and moon lining up, then it could just a 'weak' effect that can be masked or enhanced by other factors. That doesn't mean it's not real, but that the underlying mechanism is unclear. I think it does mean the claimed causal link is not real, or at least not proven. Certainly if the error bars from two "reproductions" of the same experiment do not overlap, you can't and mustn't really say that the experiment found anything.