You meet a red-headed person who is a bit short-tempered then, later, another who is similarly touchy. You start to believe that red hair signals ‘watch out’. Really? You are leaping to a conclusion from an extremely small sample! But…
You meet a red-headed person who is a bit short-tempered then, later, another who is similarly touchy. You start to believe that red hair signals ‘watch out’. Really? You are leaping to a conclusion from an extremely small sample! But…
Even though replication is a cornerstone of the scientific method, psychology journals rarely publish direct replications (though that situation may be changing). Why not? Is it self-censorship, with authors not bothering to conduct or submit such studies? Or is it…
Catching up a bit, but in November of 2016 the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology published a special issue dedicated just to confirmatory research. http://www.sciencedirect.com.proxy.cc.uic.edu/science/journal/00221031/67/supp/C The whole issue is well-worth reading: There is an excellent guide to pre-registration (ostensibly for…
APS (The Association for Psychological Science) recently launched its sixth journal: Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science. A dreadful mouthful of a title–why not drop ‘Advances in’ for a start–but it looks highly promising. Maybe it will become…
Science has had some rough times lately, no doubt. No need to rehearse the many findings indicating that we have some problems that need a fixing. As Will Gervais put it, we’re in the midst of a “methodological awakening”. The…
Why do some replication studies fail to produce the expected results? There are lots of possible reasons: the expectation might have been poorly founded, the replication study could have been under-powered, there could be some unknown moderator, etc. Sure, but…
I recently gave a research talk to Psychology at La Trobe, my old University–although I now live an hour out of the city and rarely visit the campus. I decided to turn things around from my previous few talks: Instead…
Not all problems with scientific practice are statistical. Sometimes, methods and protocols are introduced and accepted without sufficient vetting and quality control. Hopefully this is rare, but in the biological sciences there is an ongoing worry that too many ‘accepted’…
The Significance Roulette videos (here and here) are based on the probability distribution of the p value, in various situations. There’s more to the second video than I mentioned in my recent post about it. The video pictures the distribution of replication…
In my post of a couple of days ago I gave the link to Significance Roulette 1, a video that explains how to generate the roulette wheel for a ‘typical experiment’, by which I meant an independent groups experiment, N = 32…
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