Book Review: “The Seven Deadly Sins of Psychology”

This book review is a translated and slightly adjusted version of one that is currently in press for “De Psycholoog”. The review was inspired by the recent Dutch translation De 7 Doodzonden van de Psychologie (see references below). In his inaugural address on September 11th 2001, Diederik Stapel made a bold claim about the prestige and accomplishments of the field…

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Addressing Elizabeth Loftus’ Lament: When Peeking at Data is Guilt-Free

Elizabeth Loftus is one of the world’s most influential psychologists and I have the greatest respect for her and her work. Several years ago we attended the same party and I still recall her charisma and good sense of humor. Also, Elizabeth Loftus studied mathematical psychology in Stanford, and that basically makes us academic family. But…just as Stanford math psych…

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The Man Who Rewrote Conditional Probability

The universal notation for “the probability of A given B” is p(A | B). We were surprised to learn that the vertical stroke was first introduced by none other than… Sir Harold Jeffreys! At least Jeffreys himself seems to think so, and the sentiment is echoed on the website “Earliest Uses of Symbols in Probability and Statistics” Specifically, on page…

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Dennis Lindley’s Second Paradox

What is commonly referred to as “Lindley’s paradox” exposed a deep philosophical divide between frequentist and Bayesian testing, namely that, regardless of the prior distribution used, high-N data that show a significant p-value may at the same time indicate strong evidence in favor of the null hypothesis (Lindley, 1957). This “paradox” is due to Dennis Lindley, one of the most…

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