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Odds Are: On the difference between odds, probability, and risk ratio.
Odds, Probability, Chance, Risks: Interchangeable?Not so much. What does it mean to say “smokers are X times more likely to get lung cancer than non-smokers?” What about when the weather channel says, “there is a 10% chance of rain?” The odds of 1 to 10 of winning? These words are often used in casual conversations as…
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Biased results — field of psych takes the heat
The pressure to publish positive findings (instead of null results) is present across scientific discipline, but several researchers have argued that the field of Psychology is the most biased offender. An article posted last week in Nature.com discussed these biases – and presents two potential solutions one of which was suggested by UCLA researcher Dr.…
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Revisit: fMRI and the “lit up” brain
I wrote a post a few months ago about some common misconceptions about functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and one of my main points was that the term ‘lights up”, which is often used when describing the areas of the brain that respond to a task, is misleading. Here is what I said on the subject:…
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“…the difference between significant and not significant is not itself necessarily significant.”
The quote above comes from a perspective published in Nature Neuroscience this past summer by Nieuwenhuis and colleagues. They detail a surprisingly common mistake in the statistical analyses carried out by some studies published in prominent journals. It might be easier to first illustrate the mistake with an example. Let’s say I give a control…
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What Can Effect Sizes Do for You? A Quick Tutorial for a Deeper Understanding of Psychological Research
I listen to a lot of podcasts in which various psychological articles are often discussed (e.g., stuff you should know, radiolab, etc.). As a psychologist, I am often frustrated when a podcast mentions a study’s finding (e.g., having a sister is associated with better self-esteem than having a brother) but then says something like this:…
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Correlation, causation, or association – What does it all mean???
From allaboutaddiction.com: A comment posted by a reader on a recent post reprimanded me for suggesting that marijuana caused relationships to go bad. While in that instance the reader was mistaken, as I had specifically used the word associated, the comment made me think that maybe I should explain the differences here. I’m a scientist…