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Tutorial: Nuisance or Substance? Leveraging Heterogeneity of Preferences

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 December 2019

Michel Regenwetter Open the ORCID record for Michel Regenwetter [Opens in a new window]  and
Maria M. Robinson
Michel Regenwetter*
Affiliation:
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (USA)
Maria M. Robinson
Affiliation:
University of California, San Diego (USA)
*
*Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Michel Regenwetter. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Department of Psychology. 603 East Daniel St. 61820 Champaign, Illinois (USA). E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

Psychology and neighboring disciplines are currently consumed with a replication crisis. Recent work has shown that replication can have the unintended consequence of perpetuating unwarranted conclusions when repeating an incorrect line of scientific reasoning from one study to another. This tutorial shows how decision researchers can derive logically coherent predictions from their theory by keeping track of the heterogeneity of preference the theory permits, rather than dismissing such heterogeneity as a nuisance. As an illustration, we reanalyze data of Barron and Ursino (2013). By keeping track of the heterogeneity of preferences permitted by Cumulative Prospect Theory, we show how the analysis and conclusions of Barron and Ursino (2013) change. This tutorial is intended as a blue-print for graduate student projects that dig deeply into the merits of prior studies and/or that supplement replication studies with a quality check.

Keywords

heterogeneity of behaviorrandom preferencereplicabilitytutorial
Type
Research Article
Information
The Spanish Journal of Psychology , Volume 22 , 2019 , E60
Copyright
Copyright © Universidad Complutense de Madrid and Colegio Oficial de Psicólogos de Madrid 2019 

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Footnotes

Authorship is alphabetical. This paper grew out of an invited talk given at the VII Advanced International Seminar – Mathematical Models of Decision Making Processes: State of the Art and Challenges held at the School of Psychology, Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain) in October 2018 (http://eventos.ucm.es/go/DecisionMakingModels). It was supported financially by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF). This project used the public-domain QTest software, which was developed with support by NSF, under grants SES–08–20009 and SES–14–59699 (PI: Michel Regenwetter). NSF had no other role other than financial support in this project. We are grateful to Dr. Ying Guo for assistance with some computations.

How to cite this article:

Regenwetter, M., & Robinson, M. M. (2019). Tutorial: Nuisance or substance? Leveraging heterogeneity of preferences. The Spanish Journal of Psychology, 22. e60. Doi:10.1017/sjp.2019.50

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