The previous blog post discussed the preprint “Ego depletion reduces attentional control: Evidence from two high-powered preregistered experiments”. Recall the preprint abstract: “Two preregistered experiments with over 1000 participants in total found evidence of an ego depletion effect on attention control. Participants who exercised self-control on a writing task went on to make more errors…
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Several researchers have proposed that the capacity for mental control is a limited resource, one that can be temporarily depleted after having engaged in a taxing cognitive activity. This hypothetical phenomenon — called ego depletion — has been hotly debated, and its very existence has been called into question. We ourselves are in the midst of a multi-lab collaborative research…
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This Tuesday, one of us [EJ] participated in a debate about –you guessed it– the α = .005 recommendation from the paper ‘Redefine Statistical Significance’. The debate was organized as part of the Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS), and the two other discussants were Simine Vazire and Daniel Lakens. The debate was…
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This week, Dorothy Bishop visited Amsterdam to present a fabulous lecture on a topic that has not (yet) received the attention it deserves: “Fallibility in Science: Responsible Ways to Handle Mistakes”. Her slides are available here. As Dorothy presented her series of punch-in-the-gut, spine-tingling examples, I was reminded of a presentation that my Research Master students had given a few…
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The paper “Redefine Statistical Significance” continues to make people uncomfortable. This, of course, was exactly the goal: to have researchers realize that a p-just-below-.05 outcome is evidentially weak. This insight can be painful, as many may prefer the statistical blue pill (‘believe whatever you want to believe’) over the statistical red pill (‘stay in Wonderland and see how deep the…
read moreI (Alex Etz) recently attended the American Statistical Association’s “Symposium on Statistical Inference” (SSI) in Bethesda Maryland. In this post I will give you a summary of its contents and some of my personal highlights from the SSI. The purpose of the SSI was to follow up on the historic ASA statement on p-values and statistical significance. The ASA…
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In our previous post, we discussed the paper “Abandon Statistical Significance”, which is a response to the paper “Redefine Statistical Significance” that has dominated the contents of this blog so far. The Abandoners include Andrew Gelman and Christian Robert, and on their own blogs they’ve each posted a reaction to our Bayesian Spectacles post. Below is a short response to…
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Andrew Gelman and Christian Robert are two of the most opinionated and influential statisticians in the world today. Fear and anguish strike into the heart of the luckless researchers who find the fruits of their labor discussed on the pages of the duo’s blogs: how many fatal mistakes will be uncovered, how many flawed arguments will be exposed? Personally, we…
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