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

Abstract

Assessing relationships between culture and cognition is central to psychological science. To this end, free-listing is a useful methodological instrument. To facilitate its wider use, we here present the free-list method along with some of its many applications and offer a tutorial on how to prepare and statistically model free-list data as a dependent variable in Bayesian regression using openly available data and code. We further demonstrate the real-world utility of the outlined workflow by modeling within-subject agreement between a free-list task and a corollary item response scale on religious beliefs with a cross-culturally diverse sample. Overall, we fail to find a statistical association between these two instruments, an original empirical finding that calls for further inquiry into identifying the cognitive processes that item response scales and free-list tasks tap into. Throughout, we argue that free-listing is an unambiguous measure of pools of cognitive and cultural information and that the free-list method therefore has broad potential across the social sciences aiming to measure and model individual-level and cross-cultural variation in mental representations.

Gods are watching and so what? Moralistic supernatural punishment across 15 cultures

“…Free-listing might therefore be a more appropriate measure of a deity's degree of moral concern than pre-fabricated item scales used in previous studies. In fact, a recent cross-cultural methodological analysis (Bendixen and Purzycki, 2023b) failed to find clear evidence of within-subject agreement between the three-item ‘moral interest scale’ from Lang et al (2019) and Purzycki et al (2016b) and a corollary free-list task, hinting at a dissociation between these two instruments. While free-lists are more often used for descriptive or exploratory purposes (e.g.…”

Appealing to the minds of gods: religious beliefs and appeals correspond to features of local social ecologies

“…An ideal method for soliciting naturalistic, discrete, and quantifiable ethnographic data is the free-list method (Bendixen and Purzycki, n.d.b;Quinlan, 2005;Smith, 1993;Smith and Borgatti, 1997). In this task, participants list items that represent their knowledge about some topic.…”

Bilingual oral language development among dual language immersion students: Use of a Bayesian approach with language learning progressions

“…For research question 2, model comparisons helped us choose between models 1 and 2 for the inspection of point estimates and 95% CIs corresponding to the effects of grade and home language. In this paper, models were compared using the expected log pointwise predictive density (ELPD; Vehtari et al, 2017) a measure of overall fit and out-of-sample predictive accuracy (Bendixen & Purzycki, 2022). Using the loo package in R, the ELPD and its standard error were calculated using approximate leave-one-out cross-validation (Vehtari et al, 2018).…”