Author: Aaron Charlton
A follow up post about the recent JMR retraction
I found it interesting that the investigative team did a last digit analysis because I did not include any last digit analysis in my complaint. The idea of the last digit analysis is that a set of last digits from a group of related numbers should in most cases be randomly uniformly distributed from 0…
Another Jayati Sinha paper with impossible means
My opinion: The effects don’t pass the smell test Sinha and Wang (2013) claim there is a type of loneliness x time horizon crossover interaction effect on impulsive behavior. Any time you see a bunch of massive crossover effects it’s interesting. This is really the holy grail of marketing. The best way to get this kind…
AMA actively discourages authors from sharing their data with 3rd parties
If you don’t know, American Marketing Association (AMA) is the biggest association in marketing. They have four major journals, including two of our top four (Journal of Marketing and Journal of Marketing Research). A unique thing about AMA is that they have never retracted a paper at any of their journals. This is surprising given…
Thirsty dudes messing up skin care product promotions: a mini-case study
Yesterday I noticed an ad on Facebook for Jessica Alba’s skincare routine. I was surprised to be targeted with the ad to be honest because I’m not into skin care products, and I’m not a female, which would seem to be the target audience. I had recently visited the Honest Company website, which the ad…
The mystery of the “Red Potato Chip Study” Part 1
Picture is the author attempting to replicate the red chip protocol with his children acting as lab assistants. Prior to Brian Wansink being relieved of his duties due to scientific misconduct and his subsequent resignation, he ran the “Red Potato Chip Study” (Geier, Wansink & Rozin, 2012). The study claimed that people would eat fewer…
Updating your CB (Consumer Behavior) course to reflect the replication crisis
According to Evanschitzky et al. (2007), teachers should ignore findings until they have been replicated. Unfortunately, only a very small portion of all marketing studies have withstood the scrutiny of direct, preregistered replication. Moreover, a lot of things came to light in 2021 that should give us pause before we blindly endorse the collective works…
2021 marketing meta-science year in review
Okay so we are starting to learn that there could be some issues with the way that we are doing research currently. That’s okay. It’s part of the process. We can take a hard look, make changes, and come out better for it. Specifically, it looks like there may be a lot of noise mining…
Using Qualtrics survey logic to eliminate redundancy in simple experiments
I just reviewed a Qualtrics survey for a 3×2 between subjects experiment which repeated 3 times within subjects. The survey designer was fairly inexperienced so it’s not surprising that they used 36 blocks with 5-8 questions each and had incredibly complex logic to accomplish this. Unfortunately, there was so much redundancy and complexity that I…
About that metaphor priming paper…
I recently reported this paper for impossible means [link]. A few notes about the process and paper: I was very pleased with how Patricia Bauer, the editor of Psych Science handled everything. She was super appreciative and kind. And Greg Francis did an excellent job on the analysis and writeup I thought. I have zero…
Designing, running and analyzing survey data during one class period
Today in my undergraduate Marketing Research class my students and I designed a survey to collect their opinions of State Farm’s decision to pull Aaron Rodgers ads. We were able to design the survey in Qualtrics, get students’ responses, and analyze the data during a 75-minute class period. This was made possible through the use…
Conflicts between Dan Ariely’s statement and Footnote #14 (DataColada #98)
So cool that another fraudulent paper was discovered and outed. I noticed that there were conflicts between the author’s statement (he seems to blame his industry partner?) and other facts of the case. I just wanted to highlight the conflicts here because these are things that we need explained better if we are going to…
Rampant speculation is the outcome of institutional silence around retractions and firings
I noticed that after two marketing researchers (Nicole Coleman and Ping Dong) lost their jobs and got a series of retractions, there has been a wave of speculation. Not gossip about the two researchers as I would expect, but distrust of institutions; feelings of “who is the next junior researcher to be thrown under the…
