DON’T: Aim for significance. DO: Aim for precision

[From the recent working paper, “The statistical significance filter leads to overoptimistic expectations of replicability” by Vasishth, Mertzen, Jäger, and Gelman posted at PsyArXiv Preprints]
“…when power is low, using significance to decide whether to publish a result leads to a proliferation of exaggerated estimates in the literature. What is a reasonable alternative? …we can carry out a precision analysis (see chapter 13, Kruschke, 2014) before running an experiment to decide how much uncertainty of the estimate is acceptable. For example, a 95% credible interval of 40 ms is one option we chose in our final experiment, but this was only for illustration purposes; depending on the resources available, one could aim for even higher precision. For example, 184 participants in the Nicenboim et al. (2018) study had a 95% credible interval of 20 ms. Note that the goal here should not be to find an interval that does not include an effect of 0 ms; that would be identical to applying the statistical significance filter and is exactly the practice that we criticize in this paper. Rather, the goal is to achieve a particular precision level of the estimate.”
To read more, click here.

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