Careless Response Processes are Heterogeneous: Comment on Goldammer et al. (2020)

Goldammer et al. (2020) examined the performance of careless response detection indices by experimentally manipulating survey instructions to induce careless responding, then compared the ability of various indices to detect these induced careless responses. Based on these analyses, Goldammer et al. concluded that metrics designed to detect overly consistent response patters (i.e. longstring and IRV) were ineffective. In this comment, we critique this conclusion by highlighting critical problems with the experimental manipulation used. Specifically, Goldammer et al.’s manipulations only encouraged overly inconsistent, or random, responding and thus did not induce the full range of careless response behavior that is present in natural careless responding. As such, it is unsurprising that metrics designed to detect overly consistent responding did not appear to be effective. Because the full range of careless behavior was not induced, Goldammer et al.’s study cannot address the utility of longstring or similar metrics. We offer recommendations for alternative experimental manipulations that may produce more naturalistic and diverse careless responding.

Hypnotic Clever Hands: Agency and Automatic Responding

The Clever Hands task (Wegner, Fuller, & Sparrow, 2003) is a behavioral illusion in which participants make responses to a trivia quiz for which they have no sense of agency. Sixty high hypnotizable participants completed two versions of the Clever Hands task. Quiz one was a replication of the original study. Quiz two was a hypnotic adaptation using three suggestions that were based on clinical disruptions to the sense of agency. The suggestions were for: Random Responding, Thought Insertion, and Alien Control. These suggestions led to differences in accuracy (action production) and estimates of accuracy (action projection). Specifically, whereas the Random Responding suggestion had little effect, the two clinically based suggestions had opposite impacts on action production: the Thought Insertion suggestion led to an increase in the rate of correct responses (although participants still believed they were responding randomly); while the Alien Control suggestion led to a reduction in the rate of correct answers and a pattern of results that more closely approximated randomness. Contrary to theoretical accounts that claim that hypnosis affects executive monitoring rather than executive control, this result indicates that specific hypnotic suggestions can also influence the implicit processes involved in action production.

Insufficient Effort Responding as a Partial Function of Implicit Aggression

In recent years, researchers have devoted greater attention to insufficient effort responding (IER), in which participants fail to attend to instructions, do not read item content carefully, or intentionally engage in random responding. While IER is typically considered a purely methodological concern, recent research has begun to examine whether it also has a substantive basis (e.g., personality). Here we extend the nomological network surrounding IER by examining the role of implicit aggression. In three studies, we demonstrate that higher levels of implicit aggression are indeed related to IER even after controlling for previously established correlates of IER. Furthermore, we also demonstrate that IER, as measured by the selection of illogical responses to Conditional Reasoning Tests of Aggression, can predict theoretically relevant behavioral criteria. The theoretical and practical implications of this work are discussed.

Development and Initial Validation of an Inconsistent Responding Scale for the Youth Psychopathic Traits Inventory

The Youth Psychopathic Traits Inventory (YPI) is widely used in research, but there currently exist no means to identify potentially invalid protocols resulting from careless or random responding. We describe the development of an inconsistent responding scale for the YPI using three archival samples of youths, including two from the United States (juvenile justice and middle school) and one from Germany (vocational training school). We first identified pairs of correlated YPI items and then created a total score based on the sum of the absolute value of the differences for each item pair. The resulting scale strongly differentiated between genuine protocols and randomly generated YPI data (n = 1,000) across samples (AUC values = .88−.92). It also differentiated between genuine protocols and those same protocols after 50% of the original YPI items were replaced with random data (AUCs = .77−.84). Scores on this scale also demonstrated fairly consistent patterns of association with theoretically relevant correlates.