Yes, that was the question, and this is a helpful response.
I have no opinion on what the right cutoff would be if the slope were meaningfully non-zero, as there is no clear way to define the “modern” era. Perhaps I would have sliced the data with various cutoffs (e.g., 1985, 1990, 1995 . . .) and given partial credence to each resulting analysis?
Yeah, I was curious about this too, and we try to get at something theoretically similar by putting out all the “zeitgeist” studies in an attempt to define the dominant approaches of a given era. Like, in the mid-2010s, everyone was thinking about bystander stuff. But if memory serves, once I saw the above graph, I basically just dropped this whole line of inquiry because we were basically seeing no relationship between effect size and publication date. Having said that, behavioral outcomes get more common over time (see graph in original post), and that is probably also having a depressing effect on the relationship. There could be some interesting further analyses here—we try to facilitate them by open sourcing our materials.
By the way, apologies for saying above that your “intuition is moot,” I meant “your intuition about mootness is correct” 😃 (I just changed it)
Yes, that was the question, and this is a helpful response.
I have no opinion on what the right cutoff would be if the slope were meaningfully non-zero, as there is no clear way to define the “modern” era. Perhaps I would have sliced the data with various cutoffs (e.g., 1985, 1990, 1995 . . .) and given partial credence to each resulting analysis?
Yeah, I was curious about this too, and we try to get at something theoretically similar by putting out all the “zeitgeist” studies in an attempt to define the dominant approaches of a given era. Like, in the mid-2010s, everyone was thinking about bystander stuff. But if memory serves, once I saw the above graph, I basically just dropped this whole line of inquiry because we were basically seeing no relationship between effect size and publication date. Having said that, behavioral outcomes get more common over time (see graph in original post), and that is probably also having a depressing effect on the relationship. There could be some interesting further analyses here—we try to facilitate them by open sourcing our materials.
By the way, apologies for saying above that your “intuition is moot,” I meant “your intuition about mootness is correct” 😃 (I just changed it)