Widespread misperceptions of long-term attitude change
There is a severe demographic problem with this study (among others). A current trend in the social sciences is using Amazon Mechanical Turk and Prolific to run surveys. These sites are based around paying people pennies to compete menial tasks (like complete surveys), and populated with large numbers of "professional" menial task executers. This study offered the big bucks of $1.50 - $2.25. There are two major problems with this:<p>1) It doesn't matter how you normalize a sample when that sample is a niche subsample of society to begin with. This has always been a problem with the social sciences which previously relied heavily on undergraduates in social science classes, but that is going to at least be much closer to something like a representative sample than Amazon Mechanical Turk or Prolific can offer.<p>2) The people carrying out the tasks are motivated primarily by blazing through as many studies as possible while doing the bare minimum to get paid, and many fail at even that. In this study ctrl+f for "attention check." To this study's credit, they at least included numerous attention checks, but it emphasizes the issue. On average about 1 out of 6 participants were excluded for failing to correctly answer questions along the lines of "Please select C as the answer to this question."<p>Journals are likely indulging this because it's going to generate endless "impact" (which is increasingly becoming a euphemism for clickbait), but it's undermining the entire field more than ever before.