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Paul Meehl on Null Hypothesis Significance Testing

posted by martyb on Friday January 22 2016, @10:12PM   Printer-friendly
from the nothing-to-see-here dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Paul Meehl is responsible for what is probably the most apt explanation for why some areas of science have made more progress than others over the last 70 years or so. Amazingly, he pointed this out in 1967 and it had seemingly no effect on standard practices:

Because physical theories typically predict numerical values, an improvement in ex-perimental precision reduces the tolerance range and hence increases corroborability. In most psychological research, improved power of a statistical design leads to a prior probability approaching ½ of finding a significant difference in the theoretically predicted direction. Hence the corroboration yielded by "success" is very weak, and becomes weaker with increased precision. "Statistical significance" plays a logical role in psychology precisely the reverse of its role in physics. This problem is worsened by certain unhealthy tendencies prevalent among psychologists, such as a premium placed on experimental "cuteness" and a free reliance upon ad hoc explanations to avoid refuation.

Meehl, Paul E. (1967). "Theory-Testing in Psychology and Physics: A Methodological Paradox" (PDF). Philosophy of Science 34 (2): 103–115.
https://dx.doi.org/10.1086%2F288135 . Free here: http://cerco.ups-tlse.fr/pdf0609/Meehl_1967.pdf

There are many science articles posted to this site that fall foul of his critique probably because researchers are not aware of it. In short, this (putatively fatally flawed) research attempts to disprove a null hypothesis rather than a research hypothesis. Videos of some of his lectures are available online:
http://www.psych.umn.edu/meehlvideos.php

Session 7 starting at ~1hr is especially good.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 24 2016, @02:53AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 24 2016, @02:53AM (#293784)

    But in real life, disproving "neither of these two people are guilty" does not prove "at least one of these two people are guilty". Maybe one of them has a stolen identity. Maybe one of them is guilty by association. Maybe one of them is suffering from amnesia. Maybe you're in the Matrix. Maybe the law has been changed. Maybe one of them is Hitler. Maybe the dystopian government says that neither of them is guilty and that's that.

    Bullshit. Stop playing games. If you've proven that "neither of these two people are guilty" is false, then one of them must be guilty. Unless you mean an entirely different kind of proof, or you're randomly redefining words. Reword it and try again.