HOW THE EXPERIMENT WAS DONE.

HOW THE EXPERIMENT WAS DONE. Adler describes what Simmons and his colleagues (Leif D. Nelson and Uri Simonsohn) did: They divided their sample of 34 undergraduates into three groups and played for each group one of three songs. They found out the age of each student and the age of the student’s father from questionnaires.

Once they had done this, they knew that it was “highly likely” that they could find a statistically significant result using standard techniques.

Let me repeat that for emphasis: Once they had done this, they knew that it was “highly likely” that they could find a statistically significant result using standard techniques.

They knew this because they could compare results in four different ways: each song matched against one other or all three together. With the questionnaires, there were hundreds of possible comparisons, and they only needed one that “worked”.

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