Upcoming Seminars

Date: 2024-05-07, 14:00h UTC+2

Speaker: Miguel A. Vadillo, Associate Professor at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Director of the Cognition, Attention, and Learning Lab (CALL)

Title: Seeing (a pre-registered protocol) is believing

Abstract: 
How much confidence should you put on a particular hypothesis if p < .05? From a rational point of view, the credibility of a scientific finding depends on three parameters: a) the prior likelihood of the hypothesis being true, b) the probability of a significant result if the alternative hypothesis is true, and c) the probability of a significant result if the null hypothesis is true. Unfortunately, (a) is largely subjective. (b) and (c) cannot be properly estimated with the information typically reported in scientific papers, but meta-scientific studies suggest that there are reasons to be pessimistic. Psychological research is often underpowered, which means that (b) is too low, and everything suggests that many significant findings could be the result of questionable research practices, casting doubt on (c). When we read a non-registered study, we can never know if the result is reliable or if the data were simply “tortured until they confessed”. The crucial contribution of pre-registration is that it ensures that the false positive rate is not inflated by questionable research practices or selective reporting. Furthermore, pre-registration forces researchers to plan their sample size based on a formal power analysis, ensuring that (b) is sufficiently large. As a result, in this talk I will defend that it is logical to put more faith in pre-registered studies than in non-registered research. Although non-registered research is not without value, pre-registration is definitely worthwhile.

Biography:
Miguel Vadillo is associate professor at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, where he coordinates the Cognition, Attention, and Learning Lab (CALL). He is also the current president of the Spanish Society for Experimental Psychology, member of the ethical review board at UAM, and member of the scientific committee of the National Research Agency. His research is focused on statistical problems in research on implicit learning and other unconscious mental processes and also on meta-analytic methods for the detection of biases in scientific research.
https://mvadillo.com/