Assessing Validity and Bias of Within-Person Variability in Affect and Personality.

Within-person variability in affect (e.g., Neuroticism) and personality have been linked to well-being. These are measured either by asking people to report how variable they are or to give multiple reports on the construct and calculating a within-person standard deviation adjusted for confounding by the person-level mean. The two measures are weakly correlated with one another and the links of variability with well-being depend on which measure researchers use. Recent research suggests that people's repeated ratings may be biased by response styles. In a 7-day study (N = 399) with up to five measurements per day, we confirmed that the measures of variability lacked sufficient convergent validity to be used interchangeably. We found only 1 significant correlation (of 10) between variability in repeated ratings of affect or personality and variability in repeated ratings of a theoretically unrelated construct (i.e., features of images). There was very little evidence supporting the response styles hypothesis.

Not All Effects Are Indispensable: Psychological Science Requires Verifiable Lines of Reasoning for Whether an Effect Matters.

To help move researchers away from heuristically dismissing "small" effects as unimportant, recent articles have revisited arguments to defend why seemingly small effect sizes in psychological science matter. One argument is based on the idea that an observed effect size may increase in impact when generalized to a new context because of processes of accumulation over time or application to large populations. However, the field is now in danger of heuristically accepting all effects as potentially important. We aim to encourage researchers to think thoroughly about the various mechanisms that may both amplify and counteract the importance of an observed effect size. Researchers should draw on the multiple amplifying and counteracting mechanisms that are likely to simultaneously apply to the effect when that effect is being generalized to a new and likely more dynamic context. In this way, researchers should aim to transparently provide verifiable lines of reasoning to justify their claims about an effect's importance or unimportance. This transparency can help move psychological science toward a more rigorous assessment of when psychological findings matter for the contexts that researchers want to generalize to.

Percent framing attenuates the magnitude effect in a preference-matching task of intertemporal choice.

Research in intertemporal decisions shows that people value future gains less than equivalent but immediate gains by a factor known as the discount rate (i.e., people want a premium for waiting to receive a reward). A robust phenomenon in intertemporal decisions is the finding that the discount rate is larger for small gains than for large gains, termed the magnitude effect. However, the psychological underpinnings of this effect are not yet fully understood. One explanation proposes that intertemporal choices are driven by comparisons of features of the present and future choice options (e.g., information on rewards). According to this explanation, the hypothesis is that the magnitude effect is stronger when the absolute difference between present and future rewards is emphasized, compared to when their relative difference is emphasized. However, this hypothesis has only been tested using one task (the two-choice paradigm) and only for gains (i.e., not losses). It's therefore unclear whether the findings that support the hypothesis can be generalized to different methodological paradigms (e.g., preference matching) and to the domain of losses. To address this question, we conducted experiments using the preference-matching method whereby the premium amounts that people could ask for were framed in terms of either currencies (emphasizing absolute differences) or percentages (emphasizing relative differences). We thus tested the robustness of the evidence in support of the hypothesis that percent framing, relative to currency framing, attenuates the magnitude effect in the domain of gains (Studies 1, 2, and 3) and in the domain of losses (Study 1, 3, and 4). The data were heavily skewed and the assumption of equal variances was violated. Therefore, in place of parametric statistical tests, we calculated and interpreted parametric and nonparametric standardized and unstandardized effect size estimates and their confidence intervals. Overall, the results support the hypothesis.

Priming exploration across domains: does search in a spatial environment influence search in a cognitive environment?

Is there a general tendency to explore that connects search behaviour across different domains? Although the experimental evidence collected so far suggests an affirmative answer, this fundamental question about human behaviour remains open. A feasible way to test the domain-generality hypothesis is that of testing the so-called priming hypothesis: priming explorative behaviour in one domain should subsequently influence explorative behaviour in another domain. However, only a limited number of studies have experimentally tested this priming hypothesis, and the evidence is mixed. We tested the priming hypothesis in a registered report. We manipulated explorative behaviour in a spatial search task by randomly allocating people to search environments with resources that were either clustered together or dispersedly distributed. We hypothesized that, in a subsequent anagram task, participants who searched in clustered spatial environments would search for words in a more clustered way than participants who searched in the dispersed spatial environments. The pre-registered hypothesis was not supported. An equivalence test showed that the difference between conditions was smaller than the smallest effect size of interest (d = 0.36). Out of several exploratory analyses, we found only one inferential result in favour of priming. We discuss implications of these findings for the theory and propose future tests of the hypothesis.