This OSF page is a crowd-sources resource for utilizing positive controls in psychological research. What will you (eventually) find here? - Materials that you can adapt as positive controls for your own research - Discussion/tutorials on what makes a good positive control - Research on positive controls that helps indicate sensitivity to different positive controls - [A very short powerpoint on the benefits of positive controls][1]... this is the only resource actually posted at this point. A positive control (aka active control) is a research condition that has a known effect in the domain of study. Positive controls are a helpful research practice that can help make research results more interpretable. They are common in many branches of science, but not so much in psychologcal science. Positive controls can: - Help demonstrate the sensitivity of the experimental design and sample size - Help demonstrate research competence, participant engagement, and procedural correctness of the study - Provide an independent way of screening for outliers and/or careless responding among research participants. - Provide training standards for new researchers The benefits of positive controls depend on selecting an appropriate control for the research question. The ideal positive control: - Is in the same research domain (for a study of religious belief utilze a positive control related to religious belief or at least to a social attitude, not a positive control related to cognition, perception, etc.) - Has a well-established effect size (there should be little to no uncertainty about the magnitude of the effect of the positive control - Is similar in magnitude to the expected effect, or the researcher can have PCs of small, medium, and large effects where predictions about the effect of interest are very vague) - Is easy/short to administer - Is sensitive to important procedural issues (whatever you think would break the effect of interest should break the positive control) - Is assesseable at the individual level (if possible)--meaning that one can screen for out of range responses using the positive control. [1]: https://osf.io/fv8hy/download