Conceptual and Statistical Knowledge

 

The psychological reality of the learned “p < .05” boundary

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 …

The quantitative paradigm and the nature of the human mind. The replication crisis as an epistemological crisis of quantitative psychology in view of the ontic nature of the psyche

Many suggestions for dealing with the so-called replication crisis in psychology revolve around the idea that better and more complex statistical-mathematical tools or stricter procedures are required in order to obtain reliable findings and prevent …

The relation between statistical power and inference in fMRI.

Statistically underpowered studies can result in experimental failure even when all other experimental considerations have been addressed impeccably. In fMRI the combination of a large number of dependent variables, a relatively small number of …

The replication crisis is less of a “crisis” in Lakatos’ philosophy of science than it is in Popper’s

Popper’s (1983, 2002) philosophy of science has enjoyed something of a renaissance in the wake of the replication crisis, offering a philosophical basis for the ensuing science reform movement. However, adherence to Popper’s approach may also be at …

The State of Play of Reproducibility in Statistics: An Empirical Analysis

Reproducibility, the ability to reproduce the results of published papers or studies using their computer code and data, is a cornerstone of reliable scientific methodology. Studies where results cannot be reproduced by the scientific community …

The statistical power of abnormal-social psychological research: A review.

An article about statistical power of abnormal and social psychology

The Superego, the Ego, and the Id in Statistical Reasoning

Statistical reasoning is an art and so demands both mathematical knowledge and informed judgment. When it is mechanized, as with the institutionalized hybrid logic, it becomes ritual, not reasoning. Many experts have argued that it is not going to be …

The t-distritbution and its normal approximation

I just published a new interactive visualization in my series of basic statistical concepts and techniques. This time I am trying to show how the t-distribution and the normal distribution differs, and how they become very similar for larger sample …

The Test of Insufficient Variance (TIVA): A New Tool for the Detection of Questionable Research Practices

It has been known for decades that published results tend to be biased (Sterling, 1959). For most of the past decades this inconvenient truth has been ignored. In the past years, there have been many suggestions and initiatives to increase the …

The Web of Schizotypal Personality Traits: Frequentist Network Replication and Bayesian Network Re-Analysis

This thesis examines schizotypal personality traits, risk factors for schizophrenia, through both frequentist and Bayesian network models. It replicates a prior frequentist analysis by Dodell-Feder et al. (2019) and introduces a Bayesian re-analysis …