We are conducting a meta-analysis of studies on the “action-effect” (Kahneman & Tversky, 1982) documenting action-inaction asymmetries regarding emotions and counterfactual thoughts. The Stage 1 Registered Report for this meta-analysis received an in-principle acceptance from Peer Community in Registered Reports (https://rr.peercommunityin.org/articles/rec?id=51) and the preprint and all materials with simulated data and accompanying code is publicly available on the Open Science Framework (OSF) at https://osf.io/acm24/.

We ask for your help with the meta-analysis process of finding related studies, published or unpublished.

We would appreciate references to any relevant published data to be included in the meta-analysis. More importantly, we are especially interested in any relevant unpublished manuscripts or unpublished data that would not be able to find through a regular literature search.

If you have unfinished or unpublished manuscripts, we would appreciate a copy. Ideally, we would like to cite your manuscript in some way to allow others to read your work and verify that our coding of your work was accurate, yet please let us know if you want to keep this confidential, in which case we will only include our coding and refer to you for further information.

If you are unable to share unpublished manuscripts and/or data, then please provide us with the following information:
1. Brief description of the study and hypotheses
2. Findings
2a. Effect sizes for action versus Inaction in emotions and/or counterfactual thoughts, with confidence intervals if available/relevant
2b. Statistical test findings (sample size per condition, means, standards deviations, degrees of freedom, statistic, and p-values)
2c. Descriptives
3. Participant and data collection details:
3a. Sample size after exclusions
3b. Type of sample (undergraduate, online, panel, etc.)
3c. Date of data collection
3d. Country of data collection
3e. Age mean and standard deviation
4. Independent and dependent variables:
4a. Brief description of any measures/scales used
4b. Internal reliabilities if available/relevant.
5. Reference to be used when citing this data or manuscript.
6. Your preferred contact details.

If you only have raw data that has not yet been analyzed, then we would be happy to help analyze it for inclusion. In such a case, please send us the dataset and - if possible - a key/codebook/data dictionary. While such raw data will of course remain confidential, summary scores included in the meta-analysis will be made publicly available in a dataset on the OSF.

Please send all relevant information and/or data to us to the following emails:
yskjdmmh@gmail.com / giladfel@gmail.com

Please note: We are focused on emotional outcomes and counterfactuals. We make the distinction between the action-effect literature and other action-inaction asymmetries regarding judgments, decision making, and social psychology effects, such as studies of moral judgments or decisions (omission bias, trolley problems, etc.), and other action-inaction biases (status quo bias, default effects, etc.). We completed a meta-analysis on the omission bias in Yeung et al. (2022) and we reviewed of the many action-inaction biases and their differences in Feldman et al. (2020).

Yeung, S. K., Yay, T., & Feldman, G. (2022). Action and inaction in moral judgments and decisions: Meta-analysis of omission bias omission-commission asymmetries. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 48(10), 1499-1515. https://doi.org/10.1177/01461672211042315

Feldman, G., Kutscher, L., & Yay, T. (2020). Omission and commission in judgment and decision making: Understanding and linking action‐inaction effects using the concept of normality. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 14(8), e12557. https://doi.org/10.1111/spc3.12557

We would greatly appreciate it if you could share any information or studies by July 31st, 2024. We would also appreciate it if you would circulate this request to your professional networks or any colleagues investigating action and inaction.

If you are interested in more information, we will be happy to answer any further questions and keep you posted on the project as we make progress and finalize the submission.

Best regards,

Siu Kit Yeung (yskjdmmh@gmail.com) and Gilad Feldman (giladfel@gmail.com)