Is significance testing a religion?
>Hays (1963) had a chapter on Bayesian statistics in the second edition of his widely read textbook but dropped it in the subsequent editions. As he explained to one of us (GG) he dropped the chapter upon pressure from his publisher to produce a statistical cookbook that did not hint at the existence of alternative tools for statistical inference. Furthermore, he believed that many researchers are not interested in statistical thinking in the first place but solely in getting their papers published (Gigerenzer, 2000)…When Loftus (1993) became the editor ofMemory & Cognition, he made it clear in his editorial that he did not want authors to submit papers in whichp-,t-, orF-values are mindlessly being calculated and reported. Rather, he asked researchers to keep it simple and report figures with error bars, following the proverb that “a picture is worth more than a thousand p-values.” We admire Loftus for having had the courage to take this step. Years after, one of us (GG) asked Loftus about the success of his crusade against thoughtless significance testing. Loftus bitterly complained that most researchers actually refused the opportunity to escape the ritual. Even when he asked in his editorial letter to get rid of dozens ofp-values, the authors insisted on keeping them in. There is something deeply engrained in the minds of many researchers that makes them repeat the same action over and over again.
>Hays (1963) had a chapter on Bayesian statistics in the second edition of his widely read textbook but dropped it in the subsequent editions. As he explained to one of us (GG) he dropped the chapter upon pressure from his publisher to produce a statistical cookbook that did not hint at the existence of alternative tools for statistical inference. Furthermore, he believed that many researchers are not interested in statistical thinking in the first place but solely in getting their papers published (Gigerenzer, 2000)…When Loftus (1993) became the editor ofMemory & Cognition, he made it clear in his editorial that he did not want authors to submit papers in whichp-,t-, orF-values are mindlessly being calculated and reported. Rather, he asked researchers to keep it simple and report figures with error bars, following the proverb that “a picture is worth more than a thousand p-values.” We admire Loftus for having had the courage to take this step. Years after, one of us (GG) asked Loftus about the success of his crusade against thoughtless significance testing. Loftus bitterly complained that most researchers actually refused the opportunity to escape the ritual. Even when he asked in his editorial letter to get rid of dozens ofp-values, the authors insisted on keeping them in. There is something deeply engrained in the minds of many researchers that makes them repeat the same action over and over again.
