The importance of good heuristics for better science

Statistical misunderstandings due to poor heuristics, especially regarding hypothesis and data testing, need to be corrected, else we are going to spend another century advancing misconceptions of old while, at the same time, debating those same misconceptions in a never-ending cycle of academic fighting leading to nowhere.

In above article ( https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01715 ), Dolores Frías-Navarro, Juan Pascual-Llobell, and I took the opportunity to address four of those heuristics, which appear in a recent book with the potential to become an authoritative source in methodological matters. One confusion is equating the null hypothesis with randomness; another is confusing power with missing true effects; a third issue is regarding the falsificationist logic of frequentist data testing ( an issue which I had also commented upon in https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01434 ); and a fourth issue is whether we always need to be in the position of accepting the null hypothesis ( which I also commented upon in https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01504 ).

This article follows on the steps of a previous "cognitive ergonomics" approach to re-conceptualize significance testing in order to minimize confusions when testing data and inferring scientific evidence for hypotheses ( see https://doi.org/10.1177/0959354314546157 ).

• Heene, M., and Ferguson, C. J. (2017). “Psychological science’s aversion to the null, and why many of the things you think are true, aren’t,” in Psychological Science under Scrutiny: Recent Challenges and Proposed Solutions, ed., S. O. Lilienfeld and I. D. Waldman (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons), 34-52.

• Perezgonzalez, J.D., Frías-Navarro, D. and Pascual-Llobell, J. (2017). Commentary: Psychological Science’s Aversion to the Null. Front. Psychol. 8: 1715. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01715 https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01715/full