Saturday, April 7, 2018

Bookmarked for now

FlexibleMeasures.com: Competitive Reaction Time Task (CRTT)

When I was a graduate student, a version of this task was used in our lab. I strictly ran cognitive priming experiments, but I was certainly aware of how it was used and its data analyzed during lab meetings. This website, and the article accompanying it offer an eye-opening look at what happens when a measurement of aggressive behavior is not standardized. I want to come back to that at some point when time permits. Of course I am well aware that lack of standardization plagues other measurements of aggression as well. The old Buss Teacher-Learner measure of aggression was equally flexible, and I suspect a good deal of cherry-picking of findings occurred when that technique was more in vogue. I am completing a meta-analysis in which I can find one very obvious example, and that is only because the authors thankfully published all of the analyses they ran, even if they only emphasized the one that turned out to be statistically significant! I also want to comment on some psychometric issues I am noticing with some of our measures of aggressive cognition. I think we have reason to be seriously concerned with the quality of the measurements we use in aggression research, and I am increasingly suspicious of the findings that are published as a consequence.

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