| phenomenon | psychological misconception endorsement— “Endorsement of such misconceptions is often due to a failure or inability to think critically about information that may or may not be accurate (Bensley & Lilienfeld, 2017).” |
| claim-type | null-result— “This study found that students who were primed with metacognitiveand critical-thinking-based words did not differ from those who received neutral words in their endorsement of misconceptions or the potentially metacognitively advanced response on the misconceptions test.” |
| method — evidence | — “Employing a between-group, posttest experimental design, participants were randomly assigned to either the treatment or control scrambledsentence task, which was the priming manipulation.” |
| contradicts | Swami et al. (2014), priming analytic thinking reduces conspiracy theory endorsement— “This finding was surprising after Swami et al.s (2014) found that priming analytic thinking led to less conspiracy theory endorsement.” | claim_relations[0] |
| extends | Swami et al. (2016), personality differences predict belief in science-related myths— “These findings partially support Swami et al. ’s (2016) findings that individual differences in personality predict level of belief in science-related myths, while this present study also provides a more nuanced interpretation of which aspects of the Big Five may be responsible for misconception endorsement.” | claim_relations[1] |
| replicates | Gardner and Brown (2013), Test of Contemporary Misconceptions in Psychology— “Finally, similar to Gardner and Brown (2013), we found that, on average, introductory psychology students thought that both psychological facts and misconceptions were partly false and partly true, exemplified by a mean score of 2.92 across both the treatment and control.” | claim_relations[2] |
| contradicts | Kelly and Donaldson (2016), conscientiousness positively associated with metacognition— “However, it is surprising that as orderliness increases, misconception endorsement increases while endorsement of the “don’t know” response decreases.” | claim_relations[3] |
| sense | 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— “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” | senses[0] |
| sense | AND THE TWO ESCAPE HATCHES ARE NAMED BY THE AUTHORS THEMSELVES, WHICH IS THE PART WORTH RECORDING: `This finding was surprising after Swami et al.s (2014) found that priming analytic thinking led to less conspiracy theory endorsement. 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— “This finding was surprising after Swami et al.s (2014) found that priming analytic thinking led to less conspiracy theory endorsement. This difference could be because different words were used in the treatment prime in this study versus Swami et al” | senses[1] |
| sense | 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— “nonconscious activation can be achieved via supraliminal priming ( Chartrand & Bargh, 1996 ) which involves participants’ conscious awareness of the stimuli, but not of its intent” | senses[2] |
| sense | AND THE LIMITATION SECTION PUTS THE SAME HATCH IN ONE SENTENCE: `There may be better words to elicit metacognition and critical thinking.` 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— “There may be better words to elicit metacognition and critical thinking” | senses[3] |
| control | participants randomly assigned to the treatment or the control scrambled-sentence task, the two differing only in the words they contain — held — rules out that the effect comes from doing a scrambled-sentence task at all rather than from the concepts the task primes— “Employing a between-group, posttest experimental design, participants were randomly assigned to either the treatment or control scrambledsentence task, which was the priming manipulation.” | controls[0] |
| effect direction | priming —causes→ psychological misconceptions — no-change— “the priming of introductory psychology students’ metacognition and critical thinking did not positively predict their ability to dispel psychological misconceptions”— “Hence, the first hypothesis was not supported: the priming of introductory psychology students’ metacognition and critical thinking did not positively predict” | concept_edges[0] |
| note | priming —causes→ psychological misconceptions — 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.— “the priming of introductory psychology students’ metacognition and critical thinking did not positively predict their ability to dispel psychological misconceptions” | concept_edges[0] |
| weight | priming —causes→ psychological misconceptions — 0.2— “the priming of introductory psychology students’ metacognition and critical thinking did not positively predict their ability to dispel psychological misconceptions” | concept_edges[0] |
| note | nonconscious activation —operationalised-as→ supraliminal priming — '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.— “nonconscious activation can be achieved via supraliminal priming ( Chartrand & Bargh, 1996 ) which involves participants’ conscious awareness of the stimuli, but not of its intent” | concept_edges[1] |
| weight | nonconscious activation —operationalised-as→ supraliminal priming — 0.85— “nonconscious activation can be achieved via supraliminal priming ( Chartrand & Bargh, 1996 ) which involves participants’ conscious awareness of the stimuli, but not of its intent” | concept_edges[1] |
| outcome (stated by the tagger, no quotation) | control — held | controls[0] |
| replication | untested |
| limitation | 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.— “The use ofBradley and Lang’s (1999)Affective Norms for English Words (Bradley & Lang, 1999) to select semantically and emotionally neutral words for the priming task may have been a limitation.” | limitations[0] |
| limitation | Offering a "don’t know" response option on the misconceptions test may itself have distorted responding.— “Also, inclusion of the “don’t know” response option on the TCMP (Gardner & Brown, 2013) could be another limitation.” | limitations[1] |
| limitation | Exclusion criteria for low-effort responding may have been incomplete, so low-effort participants likely remained in the analytic sample.— “Although measures were taken to exclude participants who demonstrated low effort in their completion of the study, our exclusion criteria in this regard may not have been comprehensive.” | limitations[2] |
| limitation | The instruments did not show the internal consistency reliability reported in the original validation studies, suggesting response setting.— “Although scores from the TCMP showed evidence of good internal consistency reliability (Cronbach’s α = .85) in Gardner and Brown ’s study, equivalent evidence of internal consistency was not found in the present study (Cronbach ’s αtotal = 0.56; αtrue-items = 0.57; αfalse-items = 0.77).” | limitations[3] |
| limitation | COVID-19 depressed recruitment and the course-credit arrangement encouraged low-effort participation.— “The COVID-19 pandemic impacted participant recruitment as far fewer students sought to participate in studies in the current academic year than in prior years, and many of those who participated exerted low effort as they completed the study because it was of no consequence to the them and had no effect on their grades.” | limitations[4] |
| limitation | Online, uncontrolled data collection allowed distractions that may have weakened the priming manipulation.— “Also, another study limitation may be the online data collection.” | limitations[5] |
| limitation | A large number of participants had to be excluded from the analyses.— “Additionally, the number ofparticipants that had to be excluded from analyses may be a limitation to this study.” | limitations[6] |
| limitation | Ethnicity analyses were exploratory, and aggregating all students of colour into three small groups leaves group-level differences unresolved.— “However, little if any prior research has studied this relationship, and because all persons of color were aggregated into only three groups with relatively small cell sizes in this study, it remains unclear whether individuals from some ethnic groups, including those who identify as multiethnic, endorse misconceptions to a greater extent… | limitations[7] |