Priming Metacognition and Critical Thinking to Dispel Psychological Misconceptions

Priming Metacognition and Critical Thinking to Dispel Psychological Misconceptions Marissa R. Bamberger Cynthia Campbell Thomas J. Smith

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Priming Metacognition and Critical Thinking to Dispel Psychological Misconceptions 2024 Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology 10.1037/stl0000361 bamberger2024-priming-metacognition bamberger2024-priming-metacognition.txt, the project's staged copy f6074519b959f27b707b247048dea0edb165aa8a personal-copy education

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0 spans located by searching the stored text for the quote's exact words, allowing any whitespace between them null-result Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. psychological misconception endorsement Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. behavioural-experiment behavioural-experiment Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. The word set used for the priming task (drawn from the Affective Norms for English Words) may not have been the best choice for eliciting metacognition and critical thinking. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. Offering a "don’t know" response option on the misconceptions test may itself have distorted responding. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. Exclusion criteria for low-effort responding may have been incomplete, so low-effort participants likely remained in the analytic sample. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. The instruments did not show the internal consistency reliability reported in the original validation studies, suggesting response setting. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. COVID-19 depressed recruitment and the course-credit arrangement encouraged low-effort participation. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. Online, uncontrolled data collection allowed distractions that may have weakened the priming manipulation. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. A large number of participants had to be excluded from the analyses. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. Ethnicity analyses were exploratory, and aggregating all students of colour into three small groups leaves group-level differences unresolved. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. participants randomly assigned to the treatment or the control scrambled-sentence task, the two differing only in the words they contain eliminates: that the effect comes from doing a scrambled-sentence task at all rather than from the concepts the task primes · outcome (stated by the tagger, no quotation): held Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. priming priming Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. metacognition metacognition Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. supraliminal priming supraliminal priming Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. nonconscious activation nonconscious activation Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. psychological misconceptions psychological misconceptions Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. A PRIMING NULL RESULT, STATED IN THE AUTHORS' OWN VOICE AND NOT BURIED: `Hence, the first hypothesis was not supported: the priming of introductory psychology students' metacognition and critical thinking did not positively predict their ability to dispel psychological misconceptions. This finding likely indicates that the prime had no effect.` The study powered on two published effects - Swami et al. 2014 d = .46, Gervais & Norenzayan 2012 d = .44 - required N = 119 and recruited N = 184. Every other priming record I have tagged reports an effect; this one reports its absence. For a corpus about when priming works, a clean negative is worth more than another positive Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. AND THE TWO ESCAPE HATCHES ARE NAMED BY THE AUTHORS THEMSELVES, WHICH IS THE PART WORTH RECORDING: `Quotation withheld This difference could be because different words were used in the treatment prime in this study versus Swami et al.'s study.` A null attributed to word choice cannot be distinguished from a null attributed to the effect not existing - and that is the move which makes a priming literature hard to falsify. It is stated here by people running an honest study and reporting their own failure, not by a critic, which is exactly why it is worth having in the corpus verbatim Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. SUPRALIMINAL PRIMING DEFINED ON THE AXIS OF INTENT RATHER THAN VISIBILITY: `nonconscious activation can be achieved via SUPRALIMINAL PRIMING which involves participants' conscious awareness of the stimuli, but not of its intent.` The participant sees the words and does not know what they are for. dehaene1998 and holcomb2005 argue about whether the stimulus was SEEN at all; this names the other axis entirely, and a corpus that holds both can tell the two kinds of `unconscious` apart instead of pooling them Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. AND THE LIMITATION SECTION PUTS THE SAME HATCH IN ONE SENTENCE: `Quotation withheld.` The words came from the Affective Norms for English Words, chosen to be emotionally neutral, and the authors name that choice as the first limitation of the study. This is the unfalsifiable residue of any priming null - the manipulation can always have been the wrong manipulation - and it belongs in the corpus as a tagged limitation rather than as a reason to discount the record Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. contradicts → Swami et al. (2014), priming analytic thinking reduces conspiracy theory endorsement Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. extends → Swami et al. (2016), personality differences predict belief in science-related myths Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. replicates → Gardner and Brown (2013), Test of Contemporary Misconceptions in Psychology Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. contradicts → Kelly and Donaldson (2016), conscientiousness positively associated with metacognition Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. priming —causes→ psychological misconceptions priming psychological misconceptions direction on the measure: no-change · strength of the relation: 0.2 — the record marks this weak · note: WEIGHT 0.2 AND 'no-change', WHICH ARE SAYING DIFFERENT THINGS AND BOTH ARE NEEDED. 'no-change' is the measured direction: the primed and control groups did not differ. The low weight is the STRENGTH OF THE CLAIM, and it is low because the authors immediately name a reason the manipulation might have failed - 'different words were used'. A reader must not take this as evidence that priming does not affect misconceptions; it is evidence that THIS prime did not, in a study powered for d = .45. Recording it as an edge at all is the point: the alternative is that the corpus holds only the literature's successes. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. nonconscious activation —operationalised-as→ supraliminal priming nonconscious activation supraliminal priming strength of the relation: 0.85 · note: 'can be achieved via' IS THE OPERATIONALISATION AND THE REST OF THE QUOTE IS THE PRICE OF IT. The construct is nonconscious activation; the procedure is a stimulus the participant consciously sees but whose purpose they do not know. That is a genuinely different claim from the masked-priming records in this corpus, which buy unawareness by making the stimulus unreportable. Weight 0.85 rather than 0.95: the sentence is the paper citing Chartrand & Bargh and Dennis et al. for the method, not establishing it. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. 46.52% of variance in misconception endorsement explained by the full predictor set Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. the metacognition/critical-thinking prime was NOT a significant predictor of misconception endorsement Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. a majority of introductory psychology students still endorsed common misconceptions Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. ethnic-minority students showed greater misconception endorsement than White students Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. psychological misconception endorsement psychological misconception endorsement Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. regression regression Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution.

The full text of this article is not redistributable, so it is not included here. The evidence sentences are withheld with it; the tag layer and its grounding status remain. The article itself is at https://doi.org/10.1037/stl0000361.