Abstract
At the request of the authors, Special Section Editors, Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology and SAGE Publishing, the following Special Section article has been retracted.
Fischer, R., Karl, J. A., & Fischer, M. V. (2019). Norms Across Cultures: A Cross-Cultural Meta-Analysis of Norms Effects in the Theory of Planned Behavior. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 50(10), 1112–1126. doi: 10.1177/0022022119846409
Following publication of the paper, the Editor-in Chief of JCCP was made aware of problems with the data and analyses that substantially changed the reported findings. These problems remained undetected during the peer-review process and occurred unintentionally.
First, a merging error had occurred during data preparation that led to duplication of some effect sizes, and specific values throughout the manuscript changed.
Second, the monumentalism–flexibility dimension was incorrectly labelled. Higher values of this dimension indicate higher flexibility (less monumentalism) but the results reported in the manuscript were mistakenly reversed for the dimension. Thus, the norm–behavioral intentions and norm–behavior correlations were incorrectly reported to be higher in more flexible societies.
The third and most serious error in the analyses was that the paper reported using a “random-effects meta-regression analysis using REML (restricted maximum likelihood) estimation to test the effects of the culture-level moderators on the sample-level correlations.” However, the findings reported in the paper came from an analysis using a fixed-effects model and most of the significant effects reported in the paper were not confirmed when a random effects model was used.
The scope of the required changes, some producing different findings, would have resulted in a different paper that would not have been published without additional review. Given the extent of the necessary changes, the paper in its published form in the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology has been retracted.
The authors have informed the journal that they have posted a corrected version of the article as a preprint on PsyArXiv (https://psyarxiv.com/v2wz6/). The authors noted that some of the findings reported in the corrected paper differ from the findings in the published paper. The authors have additionally informed the journal that they have made the underlying data and code available on OSF (https://osf.io/rznpk/) and that they will include a link to this retraction statement citation on both of the referenced websites.