The psychological reality of the learned "p < .05" boundary.

Autor: Rao VNV; Department of Educational Psychology, University of Minnesota, 56 E River Road Room 250, Minneapolis, MN, 55455, USA. Rao00013@umn.edu., Bye JK; Department of Educational Psychology, University of Minnesota, 56 E River Road Room 250, Minneapolis, MN, 55455, USA., Varma S; School of Interactive Computing and School of Psychology, Technology Square Research Building, Georgia Institute of Technology, 85 5Th St NW, Atlanta, GA, 30308, USA.
Jazyk: angličtina
Zdroj: Cognitive research: principles and implications [Cogn Res Princ Implic] 2024 May 03; Vol. 9 (1), pp. 27. Date of Electronic Publication: 2024 May 03.
DOI: 10.1186/s41235-024-00553-x
Abstrakt: The .05 boundary within Null Hypothesis Statistical Testing (NHST) "has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move" (to quote Douglas Adams). Here, we move past meta-scientific arguments and ask an empirical question: What is the psychological standing of the .05 boundary for statistical significance? We find that graduate students in the psychological sciences show a boundary effect when relating p-values across .05. We propose this psychological boundary is learned through statistical training in NHST and reading a scientific literature replete with "statistical significance". Consistent with this proposal, undergraduates do not show the same sensitivity to the .05 boundary. Additionally, the size of a graduate student's boundary effect is not associated with their explicit endorsement of questionable research practices. These findings suggest that training creates distortions in initial processing of p-values, but these might be dampened through scientific processes operating over longer timescales.
(© 2024. The Author(s).)
Databáze: MEDLINE
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