Journal Articles

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://mro.massey.ac.nz/handle/10179/7915

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Author: search.filters.author.Williams MSubject: search.filters.subject.1701 Psychology

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    What do incoming university students believe about open science practices in psychology?
    (SAGE Publications, 11/07/2022) Beaudry JL; Williams M; Philipp MC; Kothe EJ
    Background: Understanding students’ naive conceptions about the norms that guide scientific best practice is important so that teachers can adapt to students’ existing understandings. Objective: We examined what incoming undergraduate students of psychology believe about reproducibility and open science practices. Method: We conducted an online survey with participants who were about to start their first course in psychology at a university (N = 239). Results: When asked to indicate how a researcher should conduct her study, most students endorsed several open science practices. When asked to estimate the proportion of published psychological studies that follow various open science practices, participants’ estimates averaged near 50%. Only 18% of participants reported that they had heard the term “replication crisis.” Conclusion: Despite media attention about the replication crisis, few incoming psychology students in our sample were familiar with the term. The students were nevertheless in favour of most open science practices, although they overestimated the prevalence of some of these practices in psychology. Teaching Implications: Teachers of incoming psychology students should not assume pre-existing knowledge about open science or replicability.
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    Why are beliefs in different conspiracy theories positively correlated across individuals? Testing monological network versus unidimensional factor model explanations
    (Wiley, 27/01/2022) Williams M; Marques MD; Hill SR; Kerr JR; Ling M
    A substantial minority of the public express belief in conspiracy theories. A robust phenomenon in this area is that people who believe one conspiracy theory are more likely to believe in others. But the reason for this “positive manifold” of belief in conspiracy theories is unclear. One possibility is that a single underlying latent factor (e.g. “conspiracism”) causes variation in belief in specific conspiracy theories. Another possibility is that beliefs in various conspiracy theories support one another in a mutually reinforcing network of beliefs (the “monological belief system” theory). While the monological theory has been influential in the literature, the fact that it can be operationalised as a statistical network model has not previously been recognised. In this study, we therefore tested both the unidimensional factor model and a network model. Participants were 1553 American adults recruited via Prolific. Belief in conspiracies was measured using an adapted version of the Belief in Conspiracy Theories Inventory. The fit of the two competing models was evaluated both by using van Bork et al.’s (Psychometrika, 83, 2018, 443, Multivariate Behavioral Research, 56, 2019, 175) method for testing network versus unidimensional factor models, as well as by evaluating goodness of fit to the sample covariance matrix. In both cases, evaluation of fit according to our pre-registered inferential criteria favoured the network model.