Commentary on Alister et al. (2025): Individual Differences or Unsystematic Noise?

Alister et al. (2025) reported individual differences in the extent to which people find source-dependent and source-independent claims persuasive, but an exploratory analysis showed no discernible relationship between these individual differences and demographic variables such as age, education, politics, and social-media use. Here I show through simulations that the individual-difference patterns Alister et al. identified are largely consistent with random across-trial variation in the absence of underlying differences between individuals. This casts doubt on the strength of their evidence for individual differences and provides one plausible account of why their exploratory analyses did not yield systematic relationships.