Re:Suspicious Discontinuities
by thaumasiotes on Friday September 10, 2021 @03:49PM
(#28486163)
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?".
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?".