Tag Archives: Empirical research

A reminder not to be overly impressed when presented with statistically significant coefficients, from FiveThirtyEight.com.

The Economist reports about research by Paul Smaldino and Richard McElreath indicating that studies in psychology, neuroscience and medicine have low statistical power (the probability to correctly reject a null hypothesis). If, nevertheless, almost all published studies contain significant results (i.e., rejections of null hypotheses), then this is suspicious. Furthermore, Smaldino and McElreath’s research suggests that the process of replication, by which published results are tested...