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Some comments on the “Justify Your Alpha” response to “Redefine Statistical Significance”
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Description: Benjamin et al. (2017) proposed to improve the reproducibility of findings in psychological research by lowering the alpha level of our conventional Null Hypothesis Significance Tests from .05 to .005, because findings with p-values close to .05 represent insufficient evidence. This proposal was criticized and rejected by a commentary by Lakens et al. (2017), who argued that a) the empirical evidence for the effectiveness of such a policy is weak, b) the theoretical arguments for the effectiveness of such a policy are weak, and c) the proposal also has negative consequences for reproducibility. In this contribution, I argue that the arguments by Lakens et al. are either unconvincing, or in fact arguments in favor of the proposal by Benjamin et al.