Blog

This post summarizes the content of an article that is in press for PLOS ONE. The preprint is available on PsyArXiv. Efficient medical progress requires that we know when a treatment effect is absent. We considered all 207 Original Articles published in the 2015 volume of the New England Journal of Medicine and found that 45 (21.7%) reported a null…

This post highlights a recent special issue on Bayesian inference edited by Joachim Vandekerckhove, Jeff Rouder, and John Kruschke for Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. What sets this special issue apart is that most of the 16 contributions (spanning a total of 285 pages!) have a tutorial character. Researchers and students who are new to Bayesian inference –its theoretical underpinnings, its…

Much of my professional life is now spent proselytizing: using practical examples I highlight the virtues of Bayesian inference, and warn against the intellectual Dementors that beset those who base conclusions on a p-value (yes, even when p

The promised post on Einstein will follow next week. More and more psychologists are registering their hypotheses, predictions, and analysis plans prior to data collection. Will such preregistration be the death knell for creativity and serendipity? Gilles Dutilh, Alexandra Sarafoglou, and I recently wrote an article for Perspectives on Psychological Science that provides a historical perspective on this question. In…

In an earlier blog post we discussed a response (co-authored by 88 researchers) to the paper “Redefine Statistical Significance” (RSS; co-authored by 72 researchers). Recall that RSS argued that p-values near .05 should be interpreted with caution, and proposed that a threshold of .005 is more in line with the kind of evidence that warrants strong claims such as “reject…

This is a guest post by Scott Glover. In a recent blog post, Eric-Jan and Quentin helped themselves to some more barbecued chicken. The paper in question reported a p-value of 0.028 as “clear evidence” for an effect of ego depletion on attention control. Using Bayesian analyses, Eric-Jan and Quentin showed how weak such evidence actually is. In none of…

Today I am giving a lecture at the Replication and Reproducibility Event II: Moving Psychological Science Forward, organised by the British Psychological Society. The lecture is similar to the one I gave a few months ago at an ASA meeting in Bethesda, and it makes the case for radical transparency in statistical reporting. The talking points, in order: The researcher…