Rao V N Vimal, Bye Jeffrey K, Varma Sashank
Department of Educational Psychology, University of Minnesota.
School of Interactive Computing, School of Psychology, Georgia Institute of Technology.
Top Cogn Sci. 2022 Apr;14(2):414-425. doi: 10.1111/tops.12589. Epub 2021 Nov 15.
Traditional statistics instruction emphasizes a .05 significance level for hypothesis tests. Here, we investigate the consequences of this training for researchers' mental representations of probabilities - whether .05 becomes a boundary, that is, a discontinuity of the mental number line, and alters their reasoning about p-values. Graduate students with statistical training (n = 25) viewed pairs of p-values and judged whether they were "similar" or "different." After controlling for several covariates, participants were more likely and faster to judge p-values as "different" when they crossed the .05 boundary (e.g., .046 vs. .052) compared to when they did not (e.g., .026 vs. .032). This result suggests a categorical perception-like effect for the processing of p-values. It may be a consequence of traditional statistical instruction creating a psychologically real divide between so-called statistical "significance" and "nonsignificance." Such a distortion is undesirable given modern approaches to statistical reasoning that de-emphasize dichotomizing the p-value continuum.
传统的统计学教学强调假设检验的显著性水平为0.05。在此，我们研究这种训练对研究人员概率心理表征的影响——即0.05是否成为一个边界，也就是心理数轴上的一个不连续点，并改变他们对p值的推理。接受过统计学训练的研究生（n = 25）查看了成对的p值，并判断它们是“相似”还是“不同”。在控制了几个协变量后，与未跨越0.05边界（例如，0.026对0.032）相比，当p值跨越0.05边界时（例如，0.046对0.052），参与者更有可能且更快地将p值判断为“不同”。这一结果表明在处理p值时存在类似类别知觉的效应。这可能是传统统计学教学在所谓的统计“显著性”和“非显著性”之间造成心理上真实划分的结果。鉴于现代统计推理方法不再强调将p值连续统二分法，这种扭曲是不可取的。
