ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2022
On the reliability of individual economic rationality measurements.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed.
- Optimally sequencing semantic search predicts creativity.PloS one · 2026Article
- Clarifying the reliability paradox: poor measurement reliability attenuates group differences.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Exploring the Determinants of Patient Experiences Using the Digital Topic Modeling Approach.Journal of nursing management · 2025Article
- Pre-acquired Functional Connectivity Predicts Choice Inconsistency.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2024Article
- Improving the Reliability of Cognitive Task Measures: A Narrative Review.Biological psychiatry. Cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging · 2023Review
- Influence of memory processes on choice-consistency.Royal Society open science · 2021Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
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Abstract
A contemporary research agenda in behavioral economics and neuroeconomics aims to identify individual differences and (neuro)psychological correlates of rationality. This research has been widely received in important interdisciplinary and field outlets. However, the psychometric reliability of such measurements of rationality has been presumed without enough methodological scrutiny. Drawing from multiple original and published datasets (in total over 1,600 participants), we unequivocally show that contemporary measurements of rationality have moderate to poor reliability according to common standards. Further analyses of the variance components, as well as a allowing participants to revise previous choices, suggest that this is driven by low between-subject variance rather than high measurement error. As has been argued previously for other behavioral measurements, this poses a challenge to the predominant correlational research designs and the search for sociodemographic or neural predictors. While our results draw a sobering picture of the prospects of contemporary measurements of rationality, they are not necessarily surprising from a theoretical perspective, which we outline in our discussion.
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