A note on determining the number of cues used in judgment analysis studies: The issue of type II error

Many judgment analysis studies employ multiple regression procedures to estimate the importance of cues. Some studies test the significance of regression coefficients in order to decide whether or not specific cues are attended to by the judge or decision maker. This practice is dubious because it ignores type II error. The purposes of this note are (1) to draw attention to this issue, specifically as it appears in studies of self-insight, (2) to illustrate the problem with examples from the judgment literature, and (3) to provide a simple method for calculating post-hoc power in regression analyses in order to facilitate the reporting of type II errors when regression models are used.