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| visits | member for | 1 year, 2 months |
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| stats | profile views | 7 |
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May 7 |
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Analyzing control questions data for a survey Researchers are prone to worry about it but I am yet to see evidence that satisficing is generally such a big problem (I don't see it in my research and I have run all sorts of psychological experiments with students, usability tests, long interviews with people of all ages, crowdsourcing studies on Mechanical Turk, Internet surveys in more than a dozen countries, etc.) |
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May 7 |
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Analyzing control questions data for a survey The only relevant part is the Facebook trap question but it looks like the cure is worse than the disease here. You risk confusing a great number of sincere respondents (and you certainly can't assume that the “good” respondents you exclude are picked at random so that you are not only reducing power and sample size but also introducing bias) for a benefit that is very doubtful. |
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May 7 |
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Analyzing control questions data for a survey (-1) I think this is terrible advice. The question is only tangentially related to reliability. Cronbach alpha, beside being much less useful than usually thought and often misinterpreted, does not address it at all. Alpha, internal consistency or reliability all come up when building or interpreting a scale and can only be computed over a set of scores. None of this helps to select observations. |
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Mar 1 |
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Why aren't sleep measures consistently measured as mediators/moderators of cognitive performance? One last point: As you note, the central limit theorem relies on the fact that all variables have an identical distribution and that does not only mean normal but also with the same variance. There is absolutely no guarantee that it is generally the case. Consider gender and height, gender has a lot more effect than all other variables, the resulting distribution is clearly bimodal, not normal. If you are comparing heights, measuring gender and including it in your randomization strategy and analysis would undoubtedly be valuable. |
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Mar 1 |
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Why aren't sleep measures consistently measured as mediators/moderators of cognitive performance? The reason we can get away with incredibly noisy measures and a general disregard for measurement issues in many fields of experimental psychology is that running extra student participants is cheap and everybody mostly care about (statistical) significance (meaning your measure is so noisy that you have no idea about the magnitude of an effect, just that it is not nil but you can still happily publish it and make a career out of it). |
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Mar 1 |
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Why aren't sleep measures consistently measured as mediators/moderators of cognitive performance? Also it's not true that it does not make a difference or that it is better to have as many source of error as possible. Variables like mood or fatigue can in principle reduce measurement reliability and therefore statistical power. It would be very feasible to identify the most important ones and develop better measures, it's just that we can get away with not doing it (see below). Also, if you can actually measure mood, it doesn't matter much whether it depends on the weather or not. |
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Mar 1 |
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Why aren't sleep measures consistently measured as mediators/moderators of cognitive performance? The OP did not explicitly ask about controlled experiments, though. This logic does not fly if you are thinking about (neuro)psychological tests for diagnostic purposes. Does someone know about the practice in this domain? |
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Feb 28 |
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Do we understand the non-subjective mechanisms behind pleasure and pain? Whatever happens in the eye is not perception. Whatever happens in the brain does include things like consciousness and science can't simply define it away, no matter how hard it is. Note that studying the subjective experience of redness does not necessarily mean getting lost in philosophical discussion on qualia. There is in fact a lot of very interesting research on color categories and the like. |
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Feb 28 |
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Do we understand the non-subjective mechanisms behind pleasure and pain? I don't know what “the brain is a biological computer” implies for you but if you mean that behavior is produced by the brain and ultimately explainable by chemical interactions in the brain then you ought to be interested in a (biological) account of feelings and be open to the idea that the relevant structures/processes have a causal role in behavior. Anything else amounts to a wicked kind of dualism, in which feelings happen totally outside of the brain machinery. Conflating pleasure with reward prevents you from even thinking about this problem. |
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Feb 24 |
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Do we understand the non-subjective mechanisms behind pleasure and pain? What's the point of calling it “pleasure” if you are not really interested in pleasure itself (i.e. the subjective experience)? What leads you to believe that conscious experience has no impact on outwardly observable behavior or that mice don't have any? It seems to me that there can be no reasonable answer with such conceptual confusion. |
