Psychology Professors David Trafimow and Michael Marks of New Mexico State University discuss the implications of banning p-values from appearing in published articles.
To combat the practice of p-hacking, the editors of Basic and Applied Social Psychology (BASP) will no longer publish p-values included in articles submitted to the journal. The unprecedented move by the journal’s editorial board signals publishing norms may be changing faster than previously believed, but also raises certain issues. In a recent article published by Rutledge, editors of BASP, David Trafimow and Michael Marks, bring up 3 key questions associated with the banning of the null hypothesis significance testing procedure (NHSTP).
Question 1: Will manuscripts with p-values be desk rejected automatically?
Answer 1: No […] But prior to publication, authors will have to remove all vestiges of the NHSTP (p-values, t-values, F-values, statements about ‘‘significant’’ differences or lack thereof, and so on).
Question 2: What about other types of inferential statistics such as confidence intervals or Bayesian methods?
Answer 2: Analogous to how the NHSTP fails to provide the probability of the null hypothesis, […] confidence intervals do not provide a strong case for concluding that the population parameter of interest is likely to be within the stated interval. Therefore, confidence intervals also are banned from BASP.
Question 3: Are any inferential statistical procedures required?
Answer 3: No, because the state of the art remains uncertain. However, BASP will require strong descriptive statistics, including effect sizes. We also encourage the presentation of frequency or distributional data when this is feasible. Finally, we encourage the use of larger sample sizes than is typical in much psychology research, because as the sample size increases, descriptive statistics become increasingly stable and sampling error is less of a problem.
The editors hope by banning NHSTP, submissions will increase in quality and other journal editors will notice the benefits resulting from the change and follow suit.