Hostname: page-component-77f85d65b8-2tv5m Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-03-27T13:31:23.088Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Test many theories in many ways

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2024

Wilson Cyrus-Lai Open the ORCID record for Wilson Cyrus-Lai [Opens in a new window] ,
Warren Tierney  and
Eric Luis Uhlmann
Wilson Cyrus-Lai*
Affiliation:
Organisational Behaviour Area, INSEAD, Singapore, Singapore wilson-cyrus.lai@insead.edu eric.luis.uhlmann@gmail.com
Warren Tierney
Affiliation:
Organisational Behaviour Area/Marketing Area, INSEAD, Singapore, Singapore warren.tierney@insead.edu
Eric Luis Uhlmann
Affiliation:
Organisational Behaviour Area, INSEAD, Singapore, Singapore wilson-cyrus.lai@insead.edu eric.luis.uhlmann@gmail.com
*
*Corresponding author.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Demonstrating the limitations of the one-at-a-time approach, crowd initiatives reveal the surprisingly powerful role of analytic and design choices in shaping scientific results. At the same time, cross-cultural variability in effects is far below the levels initially expected. This highlights the value of “medium” science, leveraging diverse stimulus sets and extensive robustness checks to achieve integrative tests of competing theories.

Information

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 47 , 2024 , e37
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Baribault, B., Donkin, C., Little, D. R., Trueblood, J. S., Oravecz, Z., Van Ravenzwaaij, D., … Vandekerckhove, J. (2018). Metastudies for robust tests of theory. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 115(11), 2607–2612.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Botvinik-Nezer, R., Holzmeister, F., Camerer, C. F., Dreber, A., Huber, J., Johannesson, M., … Schonberg, T. (2020). Variability in the analysis of a single neuroimaging dataset by many teams. Nature, 582, 84–88.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Brescoll, V. L., & Uhlmann, E. L. (2008). Can an angry woman get ahead? Status conferral, gender, and expression of emotion in the workplace. Psychological Science, 19, 268–275.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Breznau, N., Rinke, E. M., Wuttke, A., Nguyen, H. H., Adem, M., Adriaans, J., … Van Assche, J. (2022). Observing many researchers using the same data and hypothesis reveals a hidden universe of uncertainty. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 119(44), e2203150119.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Delios, A., Clemente, E., Wu, T., Tan, H., Wang, Y., Gordon, M., … Uhlmann, E. L. (2022). Examining the context sensitivity of research findings from archival data. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 119(30), e2120377119.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Henrich, J., Heine, S. J., & Norenzayan, A. (2010). The weirdest people in the world? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33, 61–83.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Landy, J. F., Jia, M., Ding, I. L., Viganola, D., Tierney, W., Dreber, A., … Uhlmann, E. L. (2020). Crowdsourcing hypothesis tests: Making transparent how design choices shape research results. Psychological Bulletin, 146(5), 451–479.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Leavitt, K., Mitchell, T., & Peterson, J. (2010). Theory pruning: Strategies for reducing our dense theoretical landscape. Organizational Research Methods, 13, 644–667.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mayo, D. G. (2018). Statistical inference as severe testing: How to get beyond the statistics wars. Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McGuire, W. J. (1973). The yin and yang of progress in social psychology: Seven koan. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 26(3), 446–456.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Menkveld, A. J., Dreber, A., Holzmeister, F., Huber, J., Johannesson, M., Kirchler, M., … Wu, Z.-X. (2023). Non-standard errors. The Journal of Finance. http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3961574Google Scholar
Muthukrishna, M., Bell, A. V., Henrich, J., Curtin, C. M., Gedranovich, A., McInerney, J., & Thue, B. (2020). Beyond western, educated, industrial, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) psychology: Measuring and mapping scales of cultural and psychological distance. Psychological Science, 31(6), 678–701.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Norenzayan, A., & Heine, S. J. (2005). Psychological universals: What are they and how can we know? Psychological Bulletin, 135, 763–784.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Olsson-Collentine, A., Wicherts, J. M., & van Assen, M. A. L. M. (2020). Heterogeneity in direct replications in psychology and its association with effect size. Psychological Bulletin, 146(10), 922–940.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Platt, J. R. (1964). Strong inference. Science (New York, N.Y.), 146, 347–353.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Schweinsberg, M., Feldman, M., Staub, N., van den Akker, O., van Aert, R., van Assen, M., … Uhlmann, E. (2021). Radical dispersion of effect size estimates when independent scientists operationalize and test the same hypothesis with the same data. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 165, 228–249.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Silberzahn, R., Uhlmann, E. L., Martin, D., Anselmi, P., Aust, F., Awtrey, E., … Nosek, B. A. (2018). Many analysts, one dataset: Making transparent how variations in analytical choices affect results. Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science, 1, 337–356.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Steegen, S., Tuerlinckx, F., Gelman, A., & Vanpaemel, W. (2016). Increasing transparency through a multiverse analysis. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 11, 702–712.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Tierney, W., Cyrus-Lai, W., … (2023). Who respects an angry woman? A pre-registered re-examination of the relationships between gender, emotion expression, and status conferral. Unpublished manuscript.Google Scholar
Tierney, W., Hardy, J. H. III., Ebersole, C., Leavitt, K., Viganola, D., Clemente, E., … Uhlmann, E. (2020). Creative destruction in science. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 161, 291–309.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tierney, W., Hardy, J. H. III., Ebersole, C. R., Viganola, D., Clemente, E. G., Gordon, M., … Uhlmann, E. L. (2021). A creative destruction approach to replication: Implicit work and sex morality across cultures. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 93, 104060.CrossRefGoogle Scholar