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Estimating the evidential value of significant results in psychological science

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  • Balazs Aczel
  • Bence Palfi
  • Barnabas Szaszi

Abstract

Quantifying evidence is an inherent aim of empirical science, yet the customary statistical methods in psychology do not communicate the degree to which the collected data serve as evidence for the tested hypothesis. In order to estimate the distribution of the strength of evidence that individual significant results offer in psychology, we calculated Bayes factors (BF) for 287,424 findings of 35,515 articles published in 293 psychological journals between 1985 and 2016. Overall, 55% of all analyzed results were found to provide BF > 10 (often labeled as strong evidence) for the alternative hypothesis, while more than half of the remaining results do not pass the level of BF = 3 (labeled as anecdotal evidence). The results estimate that at least 82% of all published psychological articles contain one or more significant results that do not provide BF > 10 for the hypothesis. We conclude that due to the threshold of acceptance having been set too low for psychological findings, a substantial proportion of the published results have weak evidential support.

Suggested Citation

  • Balazs Aczel & Bence Palfi & Barnabas Szaszi, 2017. "Estimating the evidential value of significant results in psychological science," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 12(8), pages 1-8, August.
    • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0182651
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0182651
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    Cited by:

    1. Jeff Miller & Rolf Ulrich, 2019. "The quest for an optimal alpha," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 14(1), pages 1-13, January.

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