: Hypotheses and Evidence . William N. Stephens.

Similarity between hypotheses and evidence.

We explore two novel consequences of similarity-based likelihood judgment. In Section I, we distinguish between the evidence on which judgments are based and the hypotheses that serve as the objects of judgment. The location of a feature, whether in the evidence or the hypotheses, influences the perceived similarity between evidence and hypotheses and consequently yields judgments that are inco...

Evidence for Alternative Hypotheses

Most researchers want evidence for the direction of an effect, not evidence against a point null hypothesis. Such evidence is ideally on a scale that is easily interpretable, with an accompanying standard error. Further, the evidence from identical experiments should be repeatable, and evidence from independent experiments should be easily combined, such as required in meta-analysis. Such a mea...

Assessing evidence and testing appropriate hypotheses.

It is crucial to identify the most appropriate hypotheses if one is to apply probabilistic reasoning to evaluate and properly understand the impact of evidence. Subtle changes to the choice of a prosecution hypothesis can result in drastically different posterior probabilities to a defence hypothesis from the same evidence. To illustrate the problem we consider a real case in which probabilisti...

G. Gayle Stephens Festschrift.

Marginally Significant Effects as Evidence for Hypotheses

Some effects are statistically significant. Other effects do not reach the threshold of statistical significance and are sometimes described as “marginally significant” or as “approaching significance.” Although the concept of marginal significance is widely deployed in academic psychology, there has been very little systematic examination of psychologists’ attitudes toward these effects. Here,...