Review of: "Are Bidding Behaviors of Jeopardy! Gameshow Contestants Influenced by Gender/Sex?"

Con dence, risk tolerance, and the dreaded null hypothesis Review of Guidry et al. "Are bidding Behaviors of Jeopardy!Gameshow Contestants In uenced by Gender/Sex?"This paper, I think, has not reached its potential.The authors focus on wagering in the gameshow Jeopardy!, looking for sex differences and nding none (like Leeds & Leeds, 2024).The general backdrop is the nding that men are overall more risk-tolerant than women (Byrnes et al., 1999).This sex difference likely taps a human universal as it emerges even among hunter-gatherers (Apicella et al., 2017).Even though not all empirical studies show this general sex difference, it is rash to conclude from the reported results that "the question of whether these differences exist remains unanswered." At this stage of the research, theoretically meaningful moderator variables could be explored.There is no moderator variable in the present research, and yet the authors assert that "the fact that contestants' risk-taking behaviors did not signi cantly differ by sex/gender over some decades suggests a potential paradigm shift in how we perceive and analyze risk-taking in competitive environments." Now, the results of one study do not overturn meta-analytic estimates; at best, they modify them, and only modestly so if the meta-analyses sit on a large research base.Perhaps we learn from this work that among highly selected top performers there will be no discernible sex differences in a memory task and because of this no differences in con dence and risk-taking.But to say that one null nding explains another does not make for strong inference.There is some evidence for better memory performance (at least of the episodic kind) among women (Herlitz & Rehnman, 2008).