Pseudo Effects: How Method Biases Can Produce Spurious Findings About Close Relationships
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Research on interpersonal relationships frequently relies on accurate self-reporting across various relationship facets (e.g., conflict, trust, appreciation). Yet shared method biases—which may greatly inflate associations between measures—are rarely accounted for during measurement validation or hypothesis testing. To examine how method biases can affect relationship research, we embarked on the ironic exploration of a new construct— Pseudo —comprised of irrelevant relationship evaluations (e.g., “My relationship has very good Saturn”). Pseudo was moderately associated with common relationship measures (e.g., satisfaction, commitment) and predicted those measures 3 weeks later. Results of a dyadic longitudinal study suggested that Pseudo taps into method biases, particularly sentiment override (i.e., people’s tendency to project their global relationship sentiments onto every relationship evaluation). We conclude that psychometric standards must be sufficiently rigorous to distinguish genuine constructs and associations from methodological artifacts that can otherwise pose a serious validity threat.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
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.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".