Why psychologists must change the way they analyze their data: the case of psi: comment on Bem (2011).
Publication year
2011Source
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100, 3, (2011), pp. 426-432ISSN
Annotation
1 maart 2011
Publication type
Article / Letter to editor

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Organization
Primary and Community Care
Journal title
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
Volume
vol. 100
Issue
iss. 3
Page start
p. 426
Page end
p. 432
Subject
NCEBP 7: Effective primary care and public healthAbstract
Does psi exist? D. J. Bem (2011) conducted 9 studies with over 1,000 participants in an attempt to demonstrate that future events retroactively affect people's responses. Here we discuss several limitations of Bem's experiments on psi; in particular, we show that the data analysis was partly exploratory and that one-sided p values may overstate the statistical evidence against the null hypothesis. We reanalyze Bem's data with a default Bayesian t test and show that the evidence for psi is weak to nonexistent. We argue that in order to convince a skeptical audience of a controversial claim, one needs to conduct strictly confirmatory studies and analyze the results with statistical tests that are conservative rather than liberal. We conclude that Bem's p values do not indicate evidence in favor of precognition; instead, they indicate that experimental psychologists need to change the way they conduct their experiments and analyze their data.
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- Academic publications [204951]
- Faculty of Medical Sciences [81049]
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