The correlation bias of psychology researchers

Abstract

There exists a voluminous literature where psychology researchers have documented the biases that people have (see Kahneman, Slovic, & Tversky, 1982; Kahneman & Tversky, 2000 for famous reviews).1,2 However, psychology researchers also are subject to biases, though this is an area that has received much less attention.3 Our goal is to make the case that there is a bias that psychology researchers have, that we term the correlation bias. Specifically, psychology researchers are biased towards looking for positive correlations and are relatively likely to ignore the possibility of negative correlations. Put another way, the correlation bias is a tendency for psychology researchers to be more likely to attempt to obtain positive than negative correlations.