Researchers’ interpretations of evidence about the association between violent attitudes and offending from different research designs

We examined the inferences authors of articles published in violence journals draw from studies about the relationship between attitudes and violent offending.

Participants (N = 120, 58.3% women) were randomly assigned to one of 12 hypothetical studies, which varied on research design and whether the results were intuitive or counterintuitive.

Participants rarely incorrectly stated that the study demonstrated causation or prediction when not warranted by the research design. However, some participants failed to acknowledge plausible alternate interpretations (e.g., third variable) and selected causal implications that were not warranted by the study’s research design. This was often more so the case when the studies’ results were intuitive than when they were counterintuitive.

Though we did find some evidence of overstepping, our findings suggest that researchers may not overstep the evidence as much as suggested by previous studies.