Psychological Science's Aversion to the Null, and Why Many of the Things You Think Are True, Aren't

Abstract

Psychological science remains rooted in some practices that mire it largely within the realm of protoscience, which may inadvertently engage in practices that prevent the falsification of those hypotheses required of a true science. This chapter focuses particularly on psychological science's longstanding aversion to null results and how this aversion detracts from the emphasis on falsification necessary for a true science. It clarifies the concept of statistical power, which is essential for the understanding of inferential statistics and the publication bias issue. Statistical power depends on: the effect size in the population, the sample size, and the chosen significance level. Much of the resistance to null effects arises from uncertainly about whether null results are “true” or due to Type II errors. In contrast, if publication bias is as prevalent as it often seems to be, meta-analysis will tend to provide a spurious and biased estimate of the population parameters.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 12 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.