Adventitious Error and Its Implications for Testing Relations Between Variables and for Composite Measurement Outcomes.

Wu and Browne (Psychometrika 80(3):571-600, 2015. https://doi.org/10.

Risky-Choice Framing Effects Result Partly From Mismatched Option Descriptions in Gains and Losses.

Textbook psychology holds that people usually prefer a certain option over a risky one when options are framed as gains but prefer the opposite when options are framed as losses. However, this pattern can be amplified, eliminated, or reversed depending on whether option descriptions include only positive information (e.g.

Accelerating Psychological Science With Metastudies: A Demonstration Using the Risky-Choice Framing Effect.

A metastudy is a set of many tiny studies (microstudies) created from a much larger collection of possibilities. Metastudies can yield many of the benefits of time-consuming replications and meta-analyses but more efficiently and with greater attention to generalizability and the causal effects of moderators. Statistical precision and power are higher than in studies with the same total sample size but with fewer conditions and more participants per condition.

When can scientific studies promote consensus among conflicting stakeholders?

While scientific studies may help conflicting stakeholders come to agreement on a best management option or policy, often they do not. We review the factors affecting trust in the efficacy and objectivity of scientific studies in an analytical-deliberative process where conflict is present, and show how they may be incorporated in an extension to the traditional Bayesian decision model. The extended framework considers stakeholders who differ in their prior beliefs regarding the probability of possible outcomes (in particular, whether a proposed technology is hazardous), differ in their valuations of these outcomes, and differ in their assessment of the ability of a proposed study to resolve the uncertainty in the outcomes and their hazards--as measured by their perceived false positive and false negative rates for the study.

Sizing up information distortion: quantifying its effect on the subjective values of choice options.

When choosing between options, people often distort new information in a direction that favors their developing preference. Such information distortion is widespread and robust, but less is known about the magnitude of its effects. In particular, research has not quantified the effects of distortion relative to the values of the choice options.

Public perceptions of energy consumption and savings.

In a national online survey, 505 participants reported their perceptions of energy consumption and savings for a variety of household, transportation, and recycling activities. When asked for the most effective strategy they could implement to conserve energy, most participants mentioned curtailment (e.g.

Are medical outcomes fungible? A survey of voters, medical administrators, and physicians.

Purpose: Many analyses of medical treatments entail the aggregation of health outcomes over patients and over time. This study assessed the extent to which voters, medical administrators, and physicians consider such aggregation to be appropriate. In addition, the study assessed whether this perceived fungibility of outcomes moderates the difference between treatment recommendations in single-play decisions (for 1 patient on 1 occasion) and those in repeated-play decisions (for several patients or for 1 patient on several occasions).

The roles of group membership, beliefs, and norms in ecological risk perception.

Variability in ecological risk perceptions was investigated by surveying members of four stakeholder groups commonly involved in environmental policy debates. Fifty-six individuals from government, industry, environmental, and general-public groups completed a risk-perception survey in which they evaluated 34 environmental hazards on 17 attributes and also evaluated the riskiness and acceptability of each hazard. In addition, participants reported their environmental beliefs and norms using Dunlap et al.

When things don't add up: the role of perceived fungibility in repeated-play decisions.

Previous research on repeated-play decisions has focused on choices with fungible outcomes. We investigated the perceived fungibility of outcomes over repeated plays of risky prospects in several situations, as well as the relationship between perceived fungibility and preferences for taking risks in those situations. Perceived fungibility varied substantially across participants and situations, with outcomes experienced by different people (e.

Aggregate, disaggregate, and hybrid analyses of ecological risk perceptions.

Laypeople's perceptions of health and safety risks have been widely studied, but only a few studies have addressed perceptions of ecological hazards. We assembled a list of 39 attributes of ecological hazards from the literatures on comparative risk assessment, ecological health, environmental conservation and management, environmental psychology, and risk perception. In Study 1, 125 laypeople evaluated 83 hazards on subsets of this attribute set.

Ecological risk ranking: development and evaluation of a method for improving public participation in environmental decision making.

This article reports an extension of the Carnegie Mellon risk-ranking method to incorporate ecological risks and their attributes. On the basis of earlier risk-perception studies, we identified a set of 20 relevant attributes for describing health, safety, and environmental hazards in standardized risk summary sheets. In a series of three ranking sessions, 23 laypeople ranked 10 such hazards in a fictional Midwestern U.

Searching for a two-factor model of marriage duration: commentary on Gottman and Levenson.

Gottman and Levenson (2002) report a number of post hoc ordinary least squares regressions to "predict" the length of marriage, given that divorce has occurred. We argue that the type of statistical model they use is inappropriate for answering clinically relevant questions about the causes and timing of divorce, and present several reasons why an alternative family of models called duration models would be more appropriate. The distribution of marriage length is not bimodal, as Gottman and Levenson suggest, and their search for a two-factor model for explaining marriage length is misguided.