Psychology Is a Property of Persons, Not Averages or Distributions: Confronting the Group-to-Person Generalizability Problem in Experimental Psychology
dc.contributor.author | McManus, RM | |
dc.contributor.author | Young, L | |
dc.contributor.author | Sweetman, J | |
dc.date.accessioned | 2023-09-11T13:28:12Z | |
dc.date.issued | 2023-09-07 | |
dc.date.updated | 2023-09-11T12:49:05Z | |
dc.description.abstract | When experimental psychologists make a claim (e.g., “Participants judged X as morally worse than Y”), how many participants are represented? Such claims are often based exclusively on group-level analyses; here, psychologists often fail to report or perhaps even investigate how many participants judged X as morally worse than Y. More troubling, group-level analyses do not necessarily generalize to the person level: “the group-to-person generalizability problem.” We first argue for the necessity of designing experiments that allow investigation of whether claims represent most participants. Second, we report findings that in a survey of researchers (and laypeople), most interpret claims based on group-level effects as being intended to represent most participants in a study. Most believe this ought to be the case if a claim is used to support a general, person-level psychological theory. Third, building on prior approaches, we document claims in the experimental-psychology literature, derived from sets of typical group-level analyses, that describe only a (sometimes tiny) minority of participants. Fourth, we reason through an example from our own research to illustrate this group-to-person generalizability problem. In addition, we demonstrate how claims from sets of simulated group-level effects can emerge without a single participant’s responses matching these patterns. Fifth, we conduct four experiments that rule out several methodology-based noise explanations of the problem. Finally, we propose a set of simple and flexible options to help researchers confront the group-to-person generalizability problem in their own work. | en_GB |
dc.identifier.citation | Vol. 6(3) | en_GB |
dc.identifier.doi | https://doi.org/10.1177/25152459231186615 | |
dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/10871/133967 | |
dc.identifier | ORCID: 0000-0002-2829-1503 (Sweetman, Joseph) | |
dc.language.iso | en | en_GB |
dc.publisher | SAGE Publications | en_GB |
dc.rights | © The Author(s) 2023. Open access. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage). | en_GB |
dc.subject | cognition | en_GB |
dc.subject | person-level | en_GB |
dc.subject | prevalence | en_GB |
dc.subject | repeated-measures | en_GB |
dc.title | Psychology Is a Property of Persons, Not Averages or Distributions: Confronting the Group-to-Person Generalizability Problem in Experimental Psychology | en_GB |
dc.type | Article | en_GB |
dc.date.available | 2023-09-11T13:28:12Z | |
dc.identifier.issn | 2515-2459 | |
dc.description | This is the final version. Available on open access from SAGE Publications via the DOI in this record | en_GB |
dc.identifier.eissn | 2515-2467 | |
dc.identifier.journal | Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science | en_GB |
dc.relation.ispartof | Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science, 6(3) | |
dc.rights.uri | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ | en_GB |
dcterms.dateAccepted | 2023-06-14 | |
rioxxterms.version | VoR | en_GB |
rioxxterms.licenseref.startdate | 2023-09-07 | |
rioxxterms.type | Journal Article/Review | en_GB |
refterms.dateFCD | 2023-09-11T13:25:14Z | |
refterms.versionFCD | VoR | |
refterms.dateFOA | 2023-09-11T13:28:14Z | |
refterms.panel | A | en_GB |
refterms.dateFirstOnline | 2023-09-07 |
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This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).