Ergodicity Paper

A new paper by Speelman, Parker, Rapley, and McGann document the unfortunate bad habit among modern psychologists of analyzing aggregates and then making unjustified conclusive statements about individuals. As has now been documented in numerous papers, results based on between-person averages do not tell us how many individuals in a study actually behaved in a manner consistent with expectation. In fact, with the small effect size magnitudes of most psychological studies, it is likely that MOST participants in a given study behaved in ways contrary to expectation. Only by conducting person-centered analyses can the number of hypothesis-consistent individuals be determined.