For the past 18 months I have served on a committee that was tasked to write a report on how to improve the replicability of the empirical sciences. The report came out this Monday, and you can find it here. Apart from the advice to conduct more replication studies, the committee’s general recommendations are as follows (pp. 47-48 of the…

The picture of the Texas sharpshooter is taken from an illustration by Dirk-Jan Hoek (CC-BY). The infamous Texas sharpshooter fires randomly at a barn door and then paints the targets around the bullet holes, creating the false impression of being an excellent marksman. The sharpshooter symbolizes the dangers of post-hoc theorizing, that is, of finding your hypothesis in the data.…

The previous blog post discussed the preprint “Ego depletion reduces attentional control: Evidence from two high-powered preregistered experiments”. Recall the preprint abstract:           “Two preregistered experiments with over 1000 participants in total found evidence of an ego depletion effect on attention control. Participants who exercised self-control on a writing task went on to make more errors…

Several researchers have proposed that the capacity for mental control is a limited resource, one that can be temporarily depleted after having engaged in a taxing cognitive activity. This hypothetical phenomenon — called ego depletion — has been hotly debated, and its very existence has been called into question. We ourselves are in the midst of a multi-lab collaborative research…

This Tuesday, one of us [EJ] participated in a debate about –you guessed it– the α = .005 recommendation from the paper ‘Redefine Statistical Significance’. The debate was organized as part of the Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS), and the two other discussants were Simine Vazire and Daniel Lakens. The debate was…

This week, Dorothy Bishop visited Amsterdam to present a fabulous lecture on a topic that has not (yet) received the attention it deserves: “Fallibility in Science: Responsible Ways to Handle Mistakes”. Her slides are available here. As Dorothy presented her series of punch-in-the-gut, spine-tingling examples, I was reminded of a presentation that my Research Master students had given a few…

The paper “Redefine Statistical Significance” continues to make people uncomfortable. This, of course, was exactly the goal: to have researchers realize that a p-just-below-.05 outcome is evidentially weak. This insight can be painful, as many may prefer the statistical blue pill (‘believe whatever you want to believe’) over the statistical red pill (‘stay in Wonderland and see how deep the…