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arXiv · 2006.11585

Time to adjust: Improving replicability in experimental psychology by adjustment for evident selective inference

Yoav Zeevi·Sofi Astashenko·Liad Mudrik·Yoav Benjamini
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Abstract

The field of psychological sciences has been grappling with the replicability crisis. Various issues have been identified as potential sources of this problem. We bring to light a potential source that has largely been overlooked and demonstrate its significant contribution to the problem: the practice of multiple comparisons. We analyzed 88 papers from the Reproducibility Project in Psychology and found that multiple results are commonly reported in a single paper, ranging from 4 to 730 (M=77.7), without multiple comparison adjustments. We retroactively applied such an adjustment using a hierarchical FDR controlling procedure (TreeBH; Bogomolov et al., 2021). 21 of 88 results were deemed insignificant after adjustment. Twenty of these 21 results indeed failed to replicate, constituting over a third of the non-replicable findings, while maintaining 97% power. We propose that this should become a common practice as an essential means to increase replicability in experimental psychology.

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Yoav Zeevi, Sofi Astashenko, Liad Mudrik, Yoav Benjamini. 2020-06-20. Time to adjust: Improving replicability in experimental psychology by adjustment for evident selective inference. https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.11585

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