This book review is a translated and slightly adjusted version of one that is currently in press for “De Psycholoog”. The review was inspired by the recent Dutch translation De 7 Doodzonden van de Psychologie (see references below). In his inaugural address on September 11th 2001, Diederik Stapel made a bold claim about the prestige and accomplishments of the field…
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Elizabeth Loftus is one of the world’s most influential psychologists and I have the greatest respect for her and her work. Several years ago we attended the same party and I still recall her charisma and good sense of humor. Also, Elizabeth Loftus studied mathematical psychology in Stanford, and that basically makes us academic family. But…just as Stanford math psych…
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The universal notation for “the probability of A given B” is p(A | B). We were surprised to learn that the vertical stroke was first introduced by none other than… Sir Harold Jeffreys! At least Jeffreys himself seems to think so, and the sentiment is echoed on the website “Earliest Uses of Symbols in Probability and Statistics” Specifically, on page…
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What is commonly referred to as “Lindley’s paradox” exposed a deep philosophical divide between frequentist and Bayesian testing, namely that, regardless of the prior distribution used, high-N data that show a significant p-value may at the same time indicate strong evidence in favor of the null hypothesis (Lindley, 1957). This “paradox” is due to Dennis Lindley, one of the most…
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A number of years ago I compiled a writing checklist for students. Its primary purpose was to make my life easier, but the list was meant to be helpful for the students as well. The checklist is here. My pet peeves: (1) abrupt changes of topic; (2) poorly designed figures; (3) tables and figures that are not described properly in…
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The Misconception Posterior Bayes factors are a good idea: they provide a measure of evidence but are relatively unaffected by the shape of the prior distribution. The Correction Posterior Bayes factors use the data twice, effectively biasing the outcome in favor of the more complex model. The Explanation The standard Bayes factor is the ratio of predictive performance between two…
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One of the famous fallacies in deductive logic is known as “affirming the consequent”. Here is an example of a syllogism gone wrong: General statement When Socrates rises early in the morning, he always has a foul mood. Specific statement Socrates has a foul mood. Deduction (invalid) Socrates has risen early in…
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Back in 2011, Daryl Bem shocked the academic world by publishing an article in which he claimed to present empirical evidence for the existence of precognition, that is, the ability of people to “look into the future” (Bem, 2011). Particularly shocking was the fact that Bem had managed to publish this claim in the flagship journal of social psychology, the…
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