oLT11: State Your Incentive
In its effort to counter the infamous replication crisis, psychological research has advanced open science practices, including rigorous reporting standards. Journal guidelines have increasingly specified the methodological details that researchers are required to report in the interest of promoting transparency and facilitating replication, such as sample size justification and the distinction between confirmatory and exploratory analyses. However, it seems that the disclosure of incentivization practices for participant recruitment has evaded the same treatment in terms of transparency. In this study, we analyzed 4,406 individual studies published across 1,905 articles in four prominent psychology journals over five years (2017–2021). Our findings reveal that 36.9% of studies failed to report the incentives they employed, reflecting a significant lack of transparency. To strengthen replicability and trust in psychological research, we call for consistent reporting regarding the incentives used to recruit research participants.
