Not a terrible heuristic, but it could just as well be simply crappy reporting, which is common, especially in the sciences.

They do at least link to the original paper, but unfortunately it's not yet in sci hub and the abstract contains none of those details.

The co-author tweeted a link to an open full-text pdf:

https://rdcu.be/cH5lt

Reasonable. But amusingly, I have the additional heuristic that sample size complaints mean that commenters don't understand statistics.

Not making fun of you. Just sharing what I thought was an interesting reaction I had to your comment: after all, it's a reasonable comment where this heuristic fails.

It's science reporting. Unfortunately, the phrase "junk science report" is redundant nowadays, but it tells you nothing about the actual science.

Apparently they openly published the data from the study: https://osf.io/mkgwr/