Implications of an educed circadian rhythm of implicit racial preference for online data collection
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Anatomy and Physiology, Psychiatry and Psychology, Statistics
- Keywords
- internet research, implicit attitudes, circadian rhythms, methods, cosinor regression
- Copyright
- © 2015 Schofield
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2015. Implications of an educed circadian rhythm of implicit racial preference for online data collection. PeerJ PrePrints 3:e1475v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.1475v1
Abstract
Time-of-day effects in human psychological functioning have been known of since the 1800s. However, outside of those specifically focused on the quantification of circadian rhythms, they have largely been neglected. Recent moves toward online data collection now mean that psychological investigations take place around the clock, but researchers have not started to take account of the effect of circadian cycles. The presence of circadian rhythms in most psychological processes are argued to be ‘unknown’, and one such unknown process – implicit racial preferences – are investigated using open data from Project Implicit. Despite their having been no prior speculation that implicit preferences should show time-of-day effects, analysis of over 1.1 million cases via cosinor regression indicates that they do. Given the unknown status of circadian rhythms in most psychological processes, the importance of giving time-of-day the time of day in the era of online data collection is advocated.
Author Comment
This is a preprint submission to PeerJ.