Enriching Psychological Research by Exploring the Source and Nature of Noise

Abstract

In psychological research, noise is often considered a nuisance that obscures rather than contributes information. This simplification overlooks that noise can be informative and that by exploring the nature of the noise one can often draw additional conclusions concerning the underlying psychological processes. It is arguably only in recent years that the mainstream of researchers has taken this idea to heart and demonstrated that it can lead to breakthroughs in the understanding of human behavior. The aim of this special section is to showcase some of the ways in which systematic exploration of noise can be achieved and how it can enrich psychological research. In this introductory article, we introduce the idea of treating noise as endogenous as opposed to exogenous to the theoretical and statistical models of psychological phenomena. We then contribute a historical review of the role of noise in psychological research, including discussions of previous endogenous treatments of noise in the literature. As an illustration, we describe our own research on the precise/not precise model and show how noise distributions can be used to delineate analytic and intuitive modes of reasoning. Finally, we briefly introduce the other contributions to this special section.