Evidence map›Paper›PMID 38700660›Full record

ArticleCognitive research: principles and implications2024

The psychological reality of the learned "p < .05" boundary.

V N Vimal Rao, Jeffrey K Bye, Sashank Varma

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Article in Cognitive research: principles and implications, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.

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1 · What the graph read from it

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4 · The record

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5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

3 authors.

V N Vimal RaoDepartment of Educational Psychology, University of Minnesota, 56 E River Road Room 250, Minneapolis, MN, 55455, USA. Rao00013@umn.edu.ORCID 0000-0001-8295-3080
Jeffrey K ByeDepartment of Educational Psychology, University of Minnesota, 56 E River Road Room 250, Minneapolis, MN, 55455, USA.
Sashank VarmaSchool of Interactive Computing and School of Psychology, Technology Square Research Building, Georgia Institute of Technology, 85 5Th St NW, Atlanta, GA, 30308, USA.

Funding

No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.

6 · The paper itself

Abstract

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 is the psychological standing of the .05 boundary for statistical significance? We find that graduate students in the psychological sciences show a boundary effect when relating p-values across .05. We propose this psychological boundary is learned through statistical training in NHST and reading a scientific literature replete with "statistical significance". Consistent with this proposal, undergraduates do not show the same sensitivity to the .05 boundary. Additionally, the size of a graduate student's boundary effect is not associated with their explicit endorsement of questionable research practices. These findings suggest that training creates distortions in initial processing of p-values, but these might be dampened through scientific processes operating over longer timescales.

Indexed as

Statistics as TopicAdultData Interpretation, StatisticalFemaleHumansMalePsychologyYoung AdultCategorical perceptionMeta-sciencep-valuesReplication crisisStatistical thinking

Identifiers

PMID38700660
PMCPMC11068716

What Socratic holds

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LicenceCC BY
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Registered trials

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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the Socratic graph.