Operationalization Bias: A Suboptimal Research Practice in Psychology

The recent replication crisis in psychology has alerted researchers to the presence of suboptimal research practices ― that are not the cases of fraud per se ― such as the practice of stopping data collection or deleting some of the data to attain statistical significance and the tendency to refrain from publishing null results. The suboptimal research practices may be motivated by the theoretical biases a researcher ― consciously or unconsciously ― holds and may be facilitated by the flexibility in collecting, analyzing, and reporting the data. This article discusses a suboptimal research practice, the operationalization bias, i.e., the practice of operationalizing a construct or phenomenon selectively, through the exclusive employment of one or very few variables and, in turn, neglecting to employ alternative operationalizations. Using the example of the operationalization of perception in the field of cognitive penetration, this article illustrates how operationalization biases can lead to false-positive findings and how the improvements in theory concerning a psychological construct will keep a check on the suboptimal research practices like the operationalization bias.