A words in context question tests whether you can choose a word from the meaning the text supports. When the blank completes a study's conclusion, trace the conclusion back to the results. Ask how the results relate to each other, and use any signal words to tell whether the conclusion agrees with, goes against, or follows from them. Then predict the missing meaning in plain words. A word's familiar meaning may not be the meaning the text needs.
Hints
- Hint 1
Start with the results for each budgeting group. What happened to plan selection among monthly budgeters, and what happened among annual budgeters?
- Hint 2
Check the timing of the budgeting pattern. Was it already present when the consumers saw the payment label?
- Hint 3
Link the two group results to the final sentence. What role does budgeting horizon play in whether the label changes a consumer's choice?
Step-by-step
Follow the results to the research meaning
Step 1Compare the two budgeting groups
The payment label increased plan selection, but only among consumers who had previously reported budgeting month to month. What does the blank need to describe? It says how budgeting horizon affects the label's effect, since consumers who budgeted annually were unaffected. So the framing effect differed by budgeting group.
- Step 2
Use the timing to predict the meaning
Why does it matter that the budgeting pattern preceded the framing? The consumers' budgeting habits were already in place, so the label didn't create the difference in habits. Those habits instead marked whether the framing influenced choice. Our plain-word prediction is changes whether the label has an effect, because the result depends on a habit consumers already had.
- Step 3
Test the choices by their meanings
Let's test the choices against marked whether the framing influenced choice. Intensify means make stronger, but the increase in selection is the label's effect. Budgeting horizon shows which group responds to that effect. Nullify means cancel out an effect, which would leave out the monthly budgeters' response. Obscure means hide or make hard to see, yet the study lets researchers see which group responded.
- Step 4
Use the research meaning
Does moderate have a meaning that fits the effect of payment framing on consumers' choices? In research, moderate means that one factor changes the strength of another factor's effect, not necessarily that it weakens it. The effect can be present or absent depending on budgeting horizon, so this meaning fits an effect whose strength depends on an existing habit. Choice D.