Psychometrics Anonymous: Does a Transparent Data Sharing Policy Affect Data Collection?

As researchers, we are advised to share our data to improve transparency and increase the reproducibility of experiments. Simultaneously, making data freely accessible can raise ethical questions regarding the participants' privacy. We first outline the challenges regarding "open data" for researchers in light of the GDPR. Then, we turn to the impact of an open-access data sharing policy on the participants: could the participants' knowledge about the future use of the data alter the data itself? Through two pre-registered studies (N = 193, collected on campus and N = 543, online participation), we investigate whether disclosing that anonymized data will be publicly shared vs. not shared influences a potential participants' intention to take part in the study. Using both frequentist and Bayesian analysis, we conclude towards an absence of effect of a difference in data sharing policy on scores in the Big Five questionnaire and social desirability, careless response behavior, and results in the anchoring paradigm. In the second study, a lexicometric analysis of participants' reactions to openly sharing data reveals a readiness to share data and support transparency under the condition of preserved anonymity. Hence, if anonymity can be ensured, there seems to be no methodological or ethical drawback in transparent and open data sharing policies for many psychological studies.

Registered Replication Report: Dijksterhuis and van Knippenberg (1998).

Dijksterhuis and van Knippenberg (1998) reported that participants primed with a category associated with intelligence ("professor") subsequently performed 13% better on a trivia test than participants primed with a category associated with a lack of intelligence ("soccer hooligans"). In two unpublished replications of this study designed to verify the appropriate testing procedures, Dijksterhuis, van Knippenberg, and Holland observed a smaller difference between conditions (2%-3%) as well as a gender difference: Men showed the effect (9.3% and 7.6%), but women did not (0.3% and -0.3%). The procedure used in those replications served as the basis for this multilab Registered Replication Report. A total of 40 laboratories collected data for this project, and 23 of these laboratories met all inclusion criteria. Here we report the meta-analytic results for those 23 direct replications (total N = 4,493), which tested whether performance on a 30-item general-knowledge trivia task differed between these two priming conditions (results of supplementary analyses of the data from all 40 labs, N = 6,454, are also reported). We observed no overall difference in trivia performance between participants primed with the "professor" category and those primed with the "hooligan" category (0.14%) and no moderation by gender.

Rapid Serial Auditory Presentation: A New Measure of Statistical Learning in Speech Segmentation.

The Rapid Serial Visual Presentation procedure is a method widely used in visual perception research. In this paper we propose an adaptation of this method which can be used with auditory material and enables assessment of statistical learning in speech segmentation. Adult participants were exposed to an artificial speech stream composed of statistically defined trisyllabic nonsense words. They were subsequently instructed to perform a detection task in a Rapid Serial Auditory Presentation (RSAP) stream in which they had to detect a syllable in a short speech stream. Results showed that reaction times varied as a function of the statistical predictability of the syllable: second and third syllables of each word were responded to faster than first syllables. This result suggests that the RSAP procedure provides a reliable and sensitive indirect measure of auditory statistical learning.