3 ms·

> "psychologists only investigate questions with very clear, obvious answers". More like, "psychologists often publish results where questions have clear, obvi

• thaumasiotes 5y ago
  In your model, a psychologist does these things in this sequence: 1. Choose a question to investigate. 2. Get some results. 3. Compute p < 0.03. 4. Toss the paper in the trash, because p < 0.03 isn't good enough. But that's not how they operate. The reason there's a spike at 0.05 is that that's what everyone cares about. If you get p < 0.03, you're doing better than that! So the bias in favor of even lower p-values is coming from somewhere else. It definitely is not coming from the decision point of "OK, I've done the research, but do I publish it?".