replication research

The unpopular P-value is invited to dance.

1. The Paradox of Replication
   

Critic 1: It’s much too easy to get small P-values.

Critic 2: We find it very difficult to get small P-values; only 36 of 100 psychology experiments were found to yield small P-values in the recent Open Science collaboration on replication (in psychology).

Is it easy or is it hard?

You might say, there’s no paradox, the problem is that the significance levels in the original studies are often due to cherry-picking, multiple testing, optional stopping and other biasing selection effects. The mechanism by which biasing selection effects blow up P-values is very well understood, and we can demonstrate exactly how it occurs. In short, many of the initially significant results merely report “nominal” P-values not “actual” ones, and there’s nothing inconsistent between the complaints of critic 1 and critic 2.

The resolution of the paradox attests to what many have long been saying: the problem is not with the statistical methods but with their abuse. Even the P-value, the most unpopular girl in the class, gets to show a little bit of what she’s capable of. She will give you a hard time when it comes to replicating nominally significant results, if they were largely due to biasing selection effects. That is just what is wanted; it is an asset that she feels the strain, and lets you know. It is statistical accounts that can’t pick up on biasing selection effects that should worry us (especially those that deny they are relevant). That is one of the most positive things to emerge from the recent, impressive, replication project in psychology. From an article in the Smithsonian magazine “Scientists Replicated 100 Psychology Studies, and Fewer Than Half Got the Same Results”:

The findings also offered some support for the oft-criticized statistical tool known as the P value, which measures whether a result is significant or due to chance. …

The project analysis showed that a low P value was fairly predictive of which psychology studies could be replicated. Twenty of the 32 original studies with a P value of less than 0.001 could be replicated, for example, while just 2 of the 11 papers with a value greater than 0.04 were successfully replicated. (Link is here.)

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