Cognitive and cultural models in psychological science: A tutorial on modeling free-list data as a dependent variable...

Area of Science:

• Psychological Science
• Cognitive Science
• Cultural Studies

Background:

• Assessing relationships between culture and cognition is crucial in psychological science.
• Free-listing is a valuable methodological tool for this assessment.
• Existing methods may not fully capture cognitive and cultural information.

Purpose of the Study:

• To present and facilitate the wider use of the free-list method.
• To provide a tutorial on preparing and statistically modeling free-list data.
• To demonstrate the method's utility in measuring individual-level and cross-cultural variation.

Main Methods:

• The study presents the free-list method and its applications.
• A tutorial is provided for preparing and statistically modeling free-list data using Bayesian regression.
• The workflow was demonstrated by modeling within-subject agreement between a free-list task and an item response scale on religious beliefs.

Main Results:

• The study failed to find a reliable statistical association between the free-list instrument and the item response scale for religious beliefs.
• This finding suggests a need for further inquiry into the cognitive processes measured by each instrument.
• The free-list method was shown to be an unambiguous measure of cognitive and cultural information.

Conclusions:

• The free-list method has broad potential across the social sciences for measuring mental representations.
• Further research is needed to understand the distinct cognitive processes tapped by free-list tasks and item response scales.
• The study highlights the importance of methodological innovation in cultural and cognitive psychology.