MétaCan
← all works

Establishing a causal chain: Why experiments are often more effective than mediational analyses in examining psychological processes.

2005· article· en· 2,412 citations· W2114385529 on OpenAlex· 10.1037/0022-3514.89.6.845

Why is this work in the frame?

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

Canadian affiliationAn author listed a Canadian institution. This is the only route the usual frame has.

Machine scores (provisional)

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Opus teacher head0.172
GPT teacher head0.483
Teacher spread
0.312 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation status
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Abstract

The authors propose that experiments that utilize mediational analyses as suggested by R. M. Baron and D. A. Kenny (1986) are overused and sometimes improperly held up as necessary for a good social psychological paper. The authors argue that when it is easy to manipulate and measure a proposed psychological process that a series of experiments that demonstrates the proposed causal chain is superior. They further argue that when it is easy to manipulate a proposed psychological process but difficult to measure it that designs that examine underlying process by utilizing moderation can be effective. It is only when measurement of a proposed psychological process is easy and manipulation of it is difficult that designs that rely on mediational analyses should be preferred, and even in these situations careful consideration should be given to the limiting factors of such designs.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

The record

Venue
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
Topic
Social and Intergroup Psychology
Field
Social Sciences
Canadian institutions
University of Waterloo
Funders
Keywords
PsychologyCausal chainModerationProcess (computing)Social psychologyLimitingMeasure (data warehouse)Cognitive psychologyCausal modelComputer scienceEpistemologyData mining
Has abstract in OpenAlex
yes