Establishing a causal chain: why experiments are often more effective than mediational analyses in examining psychological processes.

By S. Spencer, M. Zanna, G. Fong. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2005

2,354 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5f3b4b583e9881b680d35afc6e894962ae38f25b

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Citations in the corpus

Receiver responses to rewarded referrals: the motive inferences framework (2013, background): “…provide additional support for our hypothesized process, we manipulate the salience of ulterior motives (i.e., we manipulated rather than measured the mediator) by having recommenders explicitly disclose (or not) that their behavior was affected by ulterior motives (H4; cf., Spencer et al. 2005).”
Phubbed and Alone: Phone Snubbing, Social Exclusion, and Attachment to Social Media (2017, methodology): “Future research is needed to further test the underlying processes; a moderation-ofprocess method (Spencer, Zanna, and Fong 2005) would be particularly useful here.”
Mediation Analysis in Social Psychology: Current Practices and New Recommendations (2011, background): “Figure 2 Conceptual diagram of the model fit by Tormala et al. (2007). Mediation Analysis in Social Psychology 363”
Motivated Closed-Mindedness Mediates the Effect of Threat on Political Conservatism (2011, background): “Spencer, Zanna, and Fong (2005) have pointed out, however, that when it comes to causal claims, experimental studies in which the hypothesized mediator is directly manipulated and the dependent variable is measured are methodologically superior to statistical analyses of mediation alone.”
All That Glitters Is Not Gold: How Others’ Status Influences the Effect of Power Distance Belief on Status Consumption (2016, positive): “This moderating role of consumption situation provides further support for the underlying role of signaling effectiveness in explaining the two-way interaction of PDB and other’s status on status consumption via a moderation-of-process design (Spencer, Zanna, and Fong 2005).”