If You Ignore Manipulation Errors in Your Experiments You Might Be P-Hacking Without Knowing.
23 Pages Posted: 17 Jul 2019
Date Written: July 11, 2019
Abstract
This research brief is a cautionary note on the dangers of using p-values as empirical evidence for crossover effects in consumer research. If you rely on experimental manipulation to produce between-subjects variation on a moderator construct, and then test for interaction effects on the manipulation (rather than the moderator construct), your evidence of a crossover effect might be based on spurious statistical significance. The main purpose here is to alert experimenters about ignoring manipulation errors, rather than proposing specific solutions (even though I briefly review the literature proposing methods to ameliorate the situation).
Keywords: Crossover effects, Consumer Psychology, Consumer Behavior
JEL Classification: M3, C9, C91, C93
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation