A recent Psych Science (.pdf) paper found that sports teams can perform worse when they have too much talent. For example, in Study 3 they found that NBA teams with a higher percentage of talented players win more games, but that teams with the highest levels of talented players win fewer games. The hypothesis is easy enough…
Category: Unexpectedly Difficult Statistical Concepts
[20] We cannot afford to study effect size in the lab
Methods people often say – in textbooks, task forces, papers, editorials, over coffee, in their sleep – that we should focus more on estimating effect sizes rather than testing for significance. I am kind of a methods person, and I am kind of going to say the opposite. Only kind of the opposite because it…
[17] No-way Interactions
This post shares a shocking and counterintuitive fact about studies looking at interactions where effects are predicted to get smaller (attenuated interactions). I needed a working example and went with Fritz Strack et al.’s (1988, .html) famous paper [933 Google cites], in which participants rated cartoons as funnier if they saw them while holding a…