xavier roberts-gaal

@xrg.bsky.social

160 Followers 187 Following

three language models in a trench coat harvard psych (scholar.harvard.edu/xrg)

meme about demand effects. Darth Maul from Star Wars: The Phantom Menace is igniting his lightsaber in the Naboo palace. The top panel shows Maul igniting the first beam of his lightsaber, with the phrase (from a reviewer, in Comic Sans) "I'm worried these results may be due to demand." The bottom panel shows Maul igniting the second beam of his lightsaber (in dramatic fashion), with the text in large bold font "DEMAND EFFECTS DO NOT EXIST." (Note that we only claim demand effects in online experiments using standard paradigms are weak and/or elusive, and therefore unlikely to bias results. It is a meme :))
Summary of design and results from our three studies. (A: Design) Each study used a similar experimental design, measuring both positive and negative demand in an online experiment, with three commonly-used task types (dictator game, vignette, intervention). Our experiments had ns ≈ 250 per cell. (B: Results) Observed demand effects were statistically indistinguishable from zero. The plot shows means and 95% confidence intervals for standardized mean differences derived from frequentist analyses of each experiment and an inverse variance-weighted fixed-effect estimator pooling all experiments (solid bars). Prior measurements of experimenter demand from a previous dictator game experiment (de Quidt et al., 2018; standardized mean difference from regression coefficient) and a meta-analysis primarily including small-sample, in-person studies (Coles et al., 2025; Hedge’s g statistic) are also shown for comparison (striped bars). The main text includes Bayesian analyses that quantify our uncertainty.
figure 2 from our preprint, reporting the results from two experiments we measure moral judgments about dividing money between two parties and manipulate the degree of asymmetry in the outside options each party has we find that moral judgments track predictions from rational bargaining models like the nash bargaining solution and the kalai-smorodinsky solution in a negotiation context by contrast, in a donation context, moral intuitions completely reverse, instead tracking redistributive and egalitarian principles preprint link: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/3uqks_v1