In psychology, there are a few studies so famous and influential that they have proper names: The Good Samaritan Study, the Asch Obedience Study, the Marshmallow test, etc, etc. Approaching this echelon is the “Cookie Monster Study”, an increasingly-famous study …
The Cookie-Monster Study: The highly influential memory of a long-lost study Read more »
Updated 5/21: fixed a typo, added a section on when p > .05 demonstrates a negligible effect, and added a figure at the end. Daniel Lakens recently posted a pre-print with a rousing defense of the much-maligned p-value: In essence, the …
Reply to Lakens: The correctly-used p value needs an effect size and CI Read more »
Last month I (Bob) visited a local elementary school for a “Science Alliance” visit. This is a program in our community to being local scientists into the classroom. I brought the Cartoon Network simulator I have been developing (Calin-Jageman, 2017, …
At the end of the month (March 2019) the American Statistical Association will publish a special issue on statistical inference “after p values”. The goal of the issue is to focus on the statistical “dos” rather than statistical “don’ts”. Across …
Joining the fractious debate over how to do science best Read more »
Inadequate sample sizes are kryptonite to good science–they produce waste, spurious results, and inflated effect sizes. Doing science with an inadequate sample is worse than doing nothing. In the neurosciences, large-scale surveys of the literature show that inadequate sample sizes …
Sizing up behavioral neuroscience – a meta-analysis of the fear-conditioning literature Read more »
Positive controls are one of the most useful tools for ensuring interpretable and fruitful research. Strangely, though, positive controls are rarely used in psychological research. That’s a shame, but also an opportunity–it would be an easy but substantial improvement for …
Positive Controls for Psychology – My pitch for a SIPS project Read more »
It’s not going to be a popular opinion, but I think MTurk has become a danger to sound psychological science. This breaks my heart. MTurk has helped transform my career for the better. Moreover, MTurk participants are amazing: they are …
The Perils of MTurk, Part 1: Fuel to the Publication Bias Fire? Read more »
[UPDATE: Thanks to twitter I came across this marvelous book(Jussim, 2012) that does a great job explaining the Pygmalion effect, the controversy around it, and the overall state of research on expectancy effects. I’ve amended parts of this post based on …
We’ve Been Here Before: The Replication Crisis over the Pygmalion Effect Read more »
Here’s a short talk I gave at the 2017 Society for Neuroscience meeting on sample size planning. The talk discusses: Why you should plan your sample sizes in advance What not to do (how some common approaches can lead you …
The New Statistics emphasizes effect sizes, confidence intervals, meta-analysis, and Open Science. There’s a lot of momentum to adopt this change of focus. For example, the APA recently released new guidelines for reporting quantitative research and throughout it emphasizes reporting …
Why effect sizes? A tutorial (especially for Neuroscientists) Read more »