Sources for a web questionnaire built for a research methodologies academic project.

In the context of the Research Methodologies in Humanities and Science course of the Master in Cognitive Systems and Interactive Media, we must attempt to prepare the replication of a research project chosen from the Reproducibility Project of the Open Science Framework.

We have chosen Prescribed Optimism — Is it right to be wrong about the future? originally conducted by Armor, Massey & Sackett (2008), and later reproduced by Lassetter, Brandt & van 't Veer (2016).

We test the assumption that people desire to be accurate when making predictions about their own future. Results revealed that, across four different scenarios and three manipulated variables (commitment to a decision, agency over the decision, and control over outcomes), participants thought it was better to make optimistically biased predictions than accurate or pessimistically biased predictions. Additionally, participants thought that they and others would be optimistic in the scenarios they read, but insufficiently so. We argue that prescriptions can serve as one standard by which the quality of predictions can be judged, and that this particular standard strongly endorses optimism.

See the documentation for details on how to read the responses data.

See data/Prescribed Optimism Data Analysis.ipynb* for the analyses.

* This is a Jupyter Notebook file. See also Anaconda for information on how to run this type of file.

• See the questionnaire. It is not currently saving any responses to the database, but you can still go through the survey.

• See our presentation slides.

• See our final presentation slides.

• Dimitar KARAGEORGIEV
• Mat JANSON BLANCHET
• Pol RICART
• Lida ZACHAROPOULOU

• Clone the repository/download the sources from the master branch to your computer;
• Go to the directory of the sources;
• Open the file www/index.html in a browser;
• See the questionnaire.

Read contribution guidelines.