We resorted to Wikipedia for a better understanding of null hypotheses and Bayesian analysis — ours could hardly be worse — but we still don’t grasp the objections to the publication of Daryl Bem’s ESP research in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. We agree with the critics that Dr Bem’s experiments are probably unsound, and that the journal’s publishers can’t be unaware of the likely uptick in sales (a null hypothesis?). But is it a disgrace? We can’t say.

Many statisticians say that conventional social-science techniques for analyzing data make an assumption that is disingenuous and ultimately self-deceiving: that researchers know nothing about the probability of the so-called null hypothesis.

In this case, the null hypothesis would be that ESP does not exist. Refusing to give that hypothesis weight makes no sense, these experts say; if ESP exists, why aren’t people getting rich by reliably predicting the movement of the stock market or the outcome of football games?

Instead, these statisticians prefer a technique called Bayesian analysis, which seeks to determine whether the outcome of a particular experiment “changes the odds that a hypothesis is true,” in the words of Jeffrey N. Rouder, a psychologist at the University of Missouri who, with Richard D. Morey of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, has also submitted a critique of Dr. Bem’s paper to the journal.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Thursday, January 6th, 2011 at 10:30 am.