This post is an extended synopsis of Hoogeveen, S., Wagenmakers, E.-J., Kay, A. C., & van Elk, M. (in press). Compensatory Control and Religious Beliefs: A Registered Replication Report Across Two Countries. Comprehensive Results in Social Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1080/23743603.2019.1684821   Abstract Compensatory Control Theory (CCT) suggests that religious belief systems provide an external source of control that can substitute a perceived…

This post is a synopsis of Aczel et al. (2019). A consensus-based transparency checklist. Nature Human Behaviour. Open Access: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-019-0772-6. The associated Shiny app is at http://www.shinyapps.org/apps/TransparencyChecklist/.   How can social scientists make their work more transparent? Sixty-three editors and open science advocates reached consensus on this topic and created a checklist to help authors document various transparency-related aspects of…

This post is a synopsis of Mulder, J., Gu, X., Olsson-Collentine, A., Tomarken, A., Böing-Messing, F., Hoijtink, H., Meijerink, M., Williams, D. R., Menke, J., Fox, J.-P., Rosseel, Y., Wagenmakers, E.-J., & van Lissa, C. (2019). BFpack: Flexible Bayes factor testing of scientific theories in R. Preprint available at https://arxiv.org/pdf/1911.07728.pdf Abstract “There has been a tremendous methodological development of Bayes…

This post is a synopsis of the Bayesian work featured in Landy et al. (in press). Crowdsourcing hypothesis tests: Making transparent how design choices shape research results. Psychological Bulletin. Preprint available at https://osf.io/fgepx/; the 325-page supplement is available at https://osf.io/jm9zh/; the Bayesian analyses can be found on pp. 238-295. Abstract “To what extent are research results influenced by subjective decisions…

This post is an extended synopsis of Stefan, A. M., Evans, N. J., & Wagenmakers, E.-J. (2019). Practical challenges and methodological flexibility in prior elicitation. Manuscript submitted for publication. Preprint available on PsyArXiv: https://psyarxiv.com/d42xb/       Abstract It is a well-known fact that Bayesian analyses require the specification of a prior distribution, and that different priors can lead to…

In this sentence-by-sentence breakdown of the paper “Preregistration is Redundant, at Best”, I argue that preregistration is a pragmatic tool to combat biases that invalidate statistical inference. In a perfect world, strong theory sufficiently constrains the analysis process, and/or Bayesian robots can update beliefs based on fully reported data. In the real world, however, even astrophysicists require a firewall between…

The Misconception Gelman and Hennig (2017, p. 989) argue that subjective priors cannot be evaluated by means of the data: “However, priors in the subjectivist Bayesian conception are not open to falsification (…), because by definition they must be fixed before observation. Adjusting the prior after having observed the data to be analysed violates coherence. The Bayesian system as derived…

The otherwise excellent article by Consonni et al. (2018), discussed last week, makes the following claim: “…the initial use of the BF can be attributed both to Jeffreys and Turing who introduced it independently around the same time (Kass & Raftery, 1995)” (Consonni et al., 2018, p. 638)                   This claim recently…