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The vast majority of investigations which pass for research in the field of psychology today entail the use of statistical tests of significance. The critical assumption involved in testing significance is that, if the experiment is conducted properly, the characteristics of the population have a designably determinative influence on samples drawn from it; that, for example, the mean of a population has a determinative influence on the mean of a sample drawn from it. One of the most viable alternatives to the use of the test of significance involves the theorem of Bayes’. The psychological literature is filled with misinterpretations of the nature of the test of significance. With the acceptance of the Fisher approach the psychological research worker also accepted, and then overused, the test of significance, employing it as the measure of the significance, in the largest sense of the word, of his research efforts.
David Bakan (Sat,) studied this question.