“Statistics As Rhetoric in Psychology”, 1992 (; similar):
The confusion and misunderstanding of inferential statistics found amongst a class of exiting third-year psychology students is shown to parallel similar reported misunderstandings amongst the wider psychological community.
The history of inferential statistics and of their institutionalization within psychology is briefly described, and some suggested reasons for these developments are discussed.
It is argued, supported by illustrative examples, that the rhetorical association of statistical inference with scientific method serves to assert and maintain epistemic authority in psychology.
…Some information gathered from one exiting third-year class hardly bears out these expectations. Asked to complete a questionnaire, they showed a consistent tendency to concur with propositions exaggerating the conclusions properly to be inferred from experimental evidence, and those able to calculate experimental effect-sizes from appropriate information consistently overestimated their magnitude—under some conditions by a factor of more than 2.
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