TY  - JOUR
A1  - Vasishth, Shravan
A1  - Mertzen, Daniela
A1  - Jaeger, Lena A.
A1  - Gelman, Andrew
T1  - The statistical significance filter leads to overoptimistic expectations of replicability
JF  - Journal of memory and language
N2  - It is well-known in statistics (e.g., Gelman & Carlin, 2014) that treating a result as publishable just because the p-value is less than 0.05 leads to overoptimistic expectations of replicability. These effects get published, leading to an overconfident belief in replicability. We demonstrate the adverse consequences of this statistical significance filter by conducting seven direct replication attempts (268 participants in total) of a recent paper (Levy & Keller, 2013). We show that the published claims are so noisy that even non-significant results are fully compatible with them. We also demonstrate the contrast between such small-sample studies and a larger-sample study; the latter generally yields a less noisy estimate but also a smaller effect magnitude, which looks less compelling but is more realistic. We reiterate several suggestions from the methodology literature for improving current practices.
KW  - Type M error
KW  - Replicability
KW  - Surprisal
KW  - Expectation
KW  - Locality
KW  - Bayesian data analysis
KW  - Parameter estimation
Y1  - 2018
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2018.07.004
SN  - 0749-596X
SN  - 1096-0821
VL  - 103
SP  - 151
EP  - 175
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - San Diego
ER  -