Cognitive and cultural models in psychological science: A tutorial on modeling free-list data as a dependent variable in Bayesian regression.

Abstract

Assessing relationships between culture and cognition is central to psychological science. To this end, free-listing is a useful methodological instrument. To facilitate its wider use, we here present the free-list method along with some of its many applications and offer a tutorial on how to prepare and statistically model free-list data as a dependent variable in Bayesian regression using openly available data and code. We further demonstrate the real-world utility of the outlined workflow by modeling within-subject agreement between a free-list task and a corollary item response scale on religious beliefs with a cross-culturally diverse sample. Overall, we fail to find a reliable statistical association between these two instruments, an original empirical finding that calls for further inquiry into identifying the cognitive processes that item response scales and free-list tasks tap into. Throughout, we argue that free-listing is an unambiguous measure of cognitive and cultural information and that the free-list method therefore has broad potential across the social sciences aiming to measure and model individual-level and cross-cultural variation in mental representations. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).