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Must psychologists change the way they analyze their data?
Abstract
Wagenmakers, Wetzels, Borsboom, and van der Maas (2011) argued that psychologists should replace the familiar "frequentist" statistical analyses of their data with bayesian analyses. To illustrate their argument, they reanalyzed a set of psi experiments published recently in this journal by Bem (2011), maintaining that, contrary to his conclusion, his data do not yield evidence in favor of the psi hypothesis. We argue that they have incorrectly selected an unrealistic prior distribution for their analysis and that a bayesian analysis using a more reasonable distribution yields strong evidence in favor of the psi hypothesis. More generally, we argue that there are advantages to bayesian analyses that merit their increased use in the future. However, as Wagenmakers et al.'s analysis inadvertently revealed, they contain hidden traps that must be better understood before being more widely substituted for the familiar frequentist analyses currently employed by most research psychologists.
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“Bem et al. (2011) and Richard et al. (2003) stated that effect sizes in psychology typically fall in the range of 0.2 to 0.3.”
From Using the Student's t-test with extremely small sample sizes (2013) · cites this paper as Bem et al. (2011)
In the citing paper
“However, large effect sizes are uncommon in the behavioral/psychological sciences.”
From Using the Student's t-test with extremely small sample sizes (2013) · cites this paper as Bem et al. (2011)
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Metadata
- Authors
- Bem, D. J., Utts, J., & Johnson, W. O.
- Affiliations
- Cornell University (US)
- University of California, Irvine (US)
- Venue
- Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
- Published
- 2011-10
- Volume
- 101
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 716-719
- ISSN
- 0022-3514 (ISSN-L)
- 1939-1315
- OpenAlex
- W2042930386
- Cited by
- 105
- References
- 16
- Citations by year
- 2026: 2 · 2025: 5 · 2024: 1 · 2023: 3 · 2022: 1 · 2021: 5 · 2020: 10 · 2019: 6 · 2018: 28 · 2017: 10 · 2016: 6 · 2015: 9 · 2014: 6 · 2013: 4 · 2012: 8
- FWCI
- 5.33
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Mathematics › Statistics and Probability › Statistical Methods and Bayesian Inference
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › Statistics, Probability and Uncertainty › Meta-analysis and systematic reviews
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Paranormal Experiences and Beliefs
- Keywords
- Bayesian analysis, frequentist statistics, prior selection, reanalysis, evidence evaluation
- MeSH terms
- Data Interpretation, Statistical, Humans, Psychology
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