Publications

It is often assumed that, if given the choice, people would prefer not to be gossiped about. We address this assumption by investigating reactions to gossip from the perspective of its potential targets. In two nationally representative samples, we assess whether people are ever open to being the topic of other people's gossip and find a general aversion to being talked about, unless positively. However, some people reliably do prefer to be the focus of gossip: A meta-analytic summary showed that being male, and more narcissistic predicted a greater desire to be the focus of gossip, even when that gossip is negative. And, older adults had lower desire to be positively gossiped about. We also test in confirmatory experiments whether people correctly perceive others' preferences, and find that people overestimate the extent to which others want to be gossiped about, but only when the gossip is positive.

When preregistered, one-tailed tests control false-positive results at the same rate as two-tailed tests. They are also more powerful, provided the researcher correctly identified the direction of the effect. So it is surprising that they are not more common in psychology. Here I make an argument in favor of one-tailed tests and address common mistaken objections that researchers may have to using them. The arguments presented here only apply in situations where the test is clearly preregistered. If power is truly as urgent an issue as statistics reformers suggest, then the deliberate and thoughtful use of preregistered one-tailed tests ought to be not only permitted, but encouraged in cases where researchers desire greater power. One-tailed tests are especially well suited for applied questions, replications of previously documented effects, or situations where directionally unexpected effects would be meaningless. Preregistered one-tailed tests can sensibly align the researcher's stated theory with their tested hypothesis, bring a coherence to the practice of null hypothesis statistical testing, and produce generally more persuasive results. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).