Reading a Psychology Headline End to End

Auditing a published psychology claim means running it through sampling, design, operationalization, statistics, replication, and developmental confounds before accepting any sentence of it.

One press release and the paper behind it, worked through completely: who was sampled and who the finding therefore describes, whether the design permits the causal verb the headline uses, how each variable was operationalized and what that excludes, what the significance claim does and does not establish, whether the finding has replicated, and whether an age difference in the data is age or cohort. Ends with the one sentence the study supports, written out.