alt Hacker NewsI find it more plausible given my priors as a research psychologist.
Correlational overlap between self-report scales is common. It's actually so common that at decent sample sizes, almost any arbitrary self-report will significantly correlate purely on valence. For instance, one should expect a correlation between people self-reporting "I had a tough childhood" with "I frequently suffer from skin rashes". This is because trait neuroticism (the degree to which people are prone to feel negative emotion) is a major driver of how people interpret and respond to scales generally.
In contrast, psychologists mightily struggle to find replicable experimental results. That's what you need here.
I know survey data is weak. I think you'll find that 95% of all psychological research is bad.
But your explanation isn't "much more plausible". It is based on absolutely nothing, and the priori are against it. You only have a vague idea of correlation between answers (based on probably equally unreliable papers), but nothing on the missing factor. In this paper, however, they at least take some effort to find structure in the responses, and this factor correlated stronger than the others. Shaky, but it has a basis: phones/social media/etc. are terribly addictive.
> In contrast, psychologists mightily struggle to find replicable experimental results. That's what you need here.
No, that's not needed here. The paper might not be good, but we need to get rid of the phones. It's obvious that it's a problem. Just try to take someone's phone away. What "we" do not need here is distraction from the problem.