ABSTRACT
Experimental methodology is the cornerstone of scientific research in consumer psychology. Students of consumer psychology have, correctly, long been concerned with illuminating psychological process(es). A distressingly reasonable position is to diligently maintain a quest for pursuit of an unimpeachable causal chain of process, and to justify one’s choice of demonstrating statistical or experimental mediation in that context. Mediating variables are intervening variables that occur between the independent variable and the dependent variable. Manipulating multiple independent variables enables the researchers to test for possible interactions among the independent variables. The first category of hypothesis-generation heuristics consists of nine observational heuristics that require researcher sensitivity to provocative natural occurrences. The second and third categories of research hypothesis-generating techniques go beyond observational sensitivity and accounting and require conceptual analysis on the part of the researcher, by either direct inference or mediated inference.
