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, freelisting 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 freelist 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 reliable 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 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.…”