(This article was originally published at Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science, and syndicated at StatsBlogs.)
Baruch Eitan writes:
This is some luscious garden of forking paths.
Indeed. Here’s what Malte Elson writes at the linked website:
The Competitive Reaction Time Task, sometimes also called the Taylor Aggression Paradigm (TAP), is one of the most commonly used tests to purportedly measure aggressive behavior in a laboratory environment. . . .
While the CRTT ostensibly measures how much unpleasant, or even harmful, noise a participant is willing to administer to a nonexistent confederate, that amount of noise can be extracted as a measure in myriad different ways using various combinations of volume and duration over one or more trials. There are currently 120 publications in which results are based on the CRTT, and they reported 147 different quantification strategies in total!
Elson continues:
This archive does not contain all variations of the CRTT, as some procedural differences are so substantial that their quantification strategies would be impossible to compare. . . . Given the number of different versions of the CRTT measure that can be extracted from its use in a study, it is very easy for a researcher to analyze several (or several dozen) versions of the CRTT outcome measures in a study, running hypothesis tests with one version of the measure after another until a version is found that produces the desired pattern of results. . . .
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