Noise in the process: an assessment of the evidential value of mediation effects in marketing journals
Mediation analysis plays a central role in marketing research due to its usefulness in helping toexplain complex processes. Like other forms of inference, mediation analyses are susceptible tofalse positive results. This is particularly true when analytic decisions are based on the data,rather than a priori hypotheses. To assess the collective evidential value of mediation analyses inmarketing, we used an approach first implemented by Götz and colleagues (2021) that (1)measures the relative proximity of confidence intervals to zero (RP) and (2) aggregates a relatedset of RP scores into a single distribution. For our analysis, we compared the RP distribution oftop marketing journals (2018-20) to simulations of low power, adequate power, and null effects.We also compared the marketing journals to real-world data fromJournal of Personality andSocial Psychology(JPSP) (2018-20). We found that,in terms of evidential value, mediationanalyses in marketing substantially deviated from simulations of adequate power andJPSPbutwere similar to simulations of low power and null effects. We propose study preregistration,corrections for multiple testing, and increased statistical power as solutions to increase evidencequality going forward.