What might judgment and decision making research be like if we took a Bayesian approach to hypothesis testing?
Journal Title: Judgment and Decision Making - Year 2011, Vol 6, Issue 8
Abstract
Judgment and decision making research overwhelmingly uses null hypothesis significance testing as the basis for statistical inference. This article examines an alternative, Bayesian approach which emphasizes the choice between two competing hypotheses and quantifies the balance of evidence provided by the data—one consequence of which is that experimental results may be taken to strongly favour the null hypothesis. We apply a recently-developed “Bayesian t-test” to existing studies of the anchoring effect in judgment, and examine how the change in approach affects both the tone of hypothesis testing and the substantive conclusions that one draws. We compare the Bayesian approach with Fisherian and Neyman-Pearson testing, examining its relationship to conventional p-values, the influence of effect size, and the importance of prior beliefs about the likely state of nature. The results give a sense of how Bayesian hypothesis testing might be applied to judgment and decision making research, and of both the advantages and challenges that a shift to this approach would entail.
Authors and Affiliations
William J. Matthews
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP677867
- DOI -
- Views 170
- Downloads 0
Type of army service and decision to engage in risky behavior among young people in Israel
Previous studies have examined the impact of military service on the decision to engage in risky behavior. Yet most of these studies focused on voluntary recruits, did not distinguish between legal and illegal risky acti...
Why do we overestimate others’ willingness to pay?
People typically overestimate how much others are prepared to pay for consumer goods and services. We investigated the extent to which latent beliefs about others’ affluence contribute to this overestimation. In Studies...
Assessing a domain-specific risk-taking construct: A meta-analysis of reliability of the DOSPERT scale
The DOSPERT scale has been used extensively to understand individual differences in risk attitudes across varying decision domains since 2002. The present study reports a reliability generalization meta-analysis to summa...
Delaying information search
In three studies, we examined factors that may temporarily attenuate information search. People are generally curious and dislike uncertainty, which typically encourages them to look for relevant information. Despite the...
Risk perception and risk attitudes in Tokyo: A report of the first administration of DOSPERT+M in Japan
Background: The Domain-Specific Risk Taking scale (DOSPERT) has been used to measure risk perceptions and attitudes in several nations and cultures. Takahashi translated DOSPERT to Japanese but DOSPERT responses from Jap...