Anvari Farid, Kievit Rogier, Lakens Daniël, Pennington Charlotte R, Przybylski Andrew K, Tiokhin Leo, Wiernik Brenton M, Orben Amy
Social and Economic Cognition III, Social Cognition Center Cologne, Department of Psychology, University of Cologne.
Cognitive Neuroscience Department, Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behavior, Radboud University Medical Center.
Perspect Psychol Sci. 2023 Mar;18(2):503-507. doi: 10.1177/17456916221091565. Epub 2022 Aug 22.
To help move researchers away from heuristically dismissing "small" effects as unimportant, recent articles have revisited arguments to defend why seemingly small effect sizes in psychological science matter. One argument is based on the idea that an observed effect size may increase in impact when generalized to a new context because of processes of accumulation over time or application to large populations. However, the field is now in danger of heuristically accepting all effects as potentially important. We aim to encourage researchers to think thoroughly about the various mechanisms that may both amplify and counteract the importance of an observed effect size. Researchers should draw on the multiple amplifying and counteracting mechanisms that are likely to simultaneously apply to the effect when that effect is being generalized to a new and likely more dynamic context. In this way, researchers should aim to transparently provide verifiable lines of reasoning to justify their claims about an effect's importance or unimportance. This transparency can help move psychological science toward a more rigorous assessment of when psychological findings matter for the contexts that researchers want to generalize to.
为了帮助研究人员避免凭经验将“小”效应视为不重要而不予考虑，最近的一些文章重新审视了相关论点，以捍卫为何心理学中看似小的效应量很重要。一种观点基于这样的想法，即由于随着时间的积累或应用于大量人群的过程，观察到的效应量在推广到新情境时其影响可能会增加。然而，该领域现在面临凭经验接受所有效应都可能重要的风险。我们旨在鼓励研究人员深入思考可能放大和抵消观察到的效应量重要性的各种机制。当将效应推广到一个新的且可能更具动态性的情境时，研究人员应借鉴可能同时适用于该效应的多种放大和抵消机制。通过这种方式，研究人员应旨在透明地提供可验证的推理思路，以证明他们关于效应重要性或不重要性的主张。这种透明度有助于推动心理学朝着更严格地评估心理学研究结果在研究人员想要推广到的情境中何时重要的方向发展。
