Paper #1480

Title:

On the failures of the null-hypothesis test

Author:

Nicholas Longford

Date:

April 2015

Abstract:

This report comprises four reactions to the recent policy statement in Basic and Applied Social Psychology that announced a ban on null-hypothesis testing in that journal. A personal perspective is presented which agrees with the editors that null-hypothesis testing has become dysfunctional, but proposes a solution different from the editors'. In particular, application of formal statistical methods is defended, but they have to be tailored much more closely to the specifics of the problem that is addressed.

Keywords:

decision theory; expected loss; hypothesis testing; plausible value; research agenda.

JEL codes:

MSC classification: 62F-03, 62G-10, 62H-15.

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