Objectives

We examined the inferences authors of articles published in violence journals draw from studies about the relationship between attitudes and violent offending.

Methods

Participants (N = 120, 58.3% women) were randomly assigned to one of 12 hypothetical studies, which varied on research design and whether the results were intuitive or counterintuitive.

Results

Participants rarely incorrectly stated that the study demonstrated causation or prediction when not warranted by the research design. However, some participants failed to acknowledge plausible alternate interpretations (e.g., third variable) and selected causal implications that were not warranted by the study’s research design. This was often more so the case when the studies’ results were intuitive than when they were counterintuitive.

Conclusions

Though we did find some evidence of overstepping, our findings suggest that researchers may not overstep the evidence as much as suggested by previous studies.

中文翻译：

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研究人员对不同研究设计中关于暴力态度与犯罪之间关联的证据的解释

 目标

我们研究了在暴力期刊上发表的文章的作者从关于态度与暴力犯罪之间关系的研究中得出的推论。

 方法

参与者 （N = 120,58.3% 女性） 被随机分配到 12 项假设研究中的一项，这些研究因研究设计以及结果是直觉还是反直觉而异。

 结果

参与者很少错误地表示，当研究设计没有保证时，该研究证明了因果关系或预测。然而，一些参与者未能承认合理的替代解释（例如，第三个变量）并选择了研究设计没有保证的因果关系。当研究结果直观时，情况往往比反直觉时更常见。

 结论

尽管我们确实发现了一些越界的证据，但我们的研究结果表明，研究人员可能不会像以前的研究所暗示的那样越界证据。