Representative Design in Psychological Assessment: A Case Study Using the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART)

Representative design refers to the idea that experimental stimuli should be sampled or designed such that they represent the environments to which measured constructs are supposed to generalize. In this article we investigate the role of representative design in achieving valid and reliable psychological assessments, by focusing on a widely used behavioral measure of risk taking-the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART). Specifically, we demonstrate that the typical implementation of this task violates the principle of representative design, thus conflicting with the expectations people likely form from real balloons. This observation may provide an explanation for the previously observed limitations in some of the BART's psychometric properties (e.g., convergent validity with other measures of risk taking). To experimentally test the effects of improved representative designs, we conducted two extensive empirical studies (N = 772 and N = 632), finding that participants acquired more accurate beliefs about the optimal behavior in the BART because of these task adaptions. Yet, improving the task's representativeness proved to be insufficient to enhance the BART's psychometric properties. It follows that for the development of valid behavioral measurement instruments-as are needed, for instance, in functional neuroimaging studies-our field has to overcome the philosophy of the repair program (i.e., fixing existing tasks). Instead, we suggest that the development of valid task designs requires novel ecological assessments, aimed at identifying those real-life behaviors and associated psychological processes that lab tasks are supposed to capture and generalize to.

Automated summary

Representative design plays a crucial role in achieving valid and reliable psychological assessments, as demonstrated in this study on the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART). Improving the representative designs of tasks can help participants acquire more accurate beliefs about optimal behaviors, but it may not be sufficient to enhance the psychometric properties of the task. This indicates the need for novel ecological assessments and valid task designs in developing behavioral measurement instruments.