Published in

SAGE Publications, Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science, 4(2), p. 364-377, 2019

DOI: 10.1177/2515245919876960

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How Do I Know What My Theory Predicts?

Journal article published in 2019 by Zoltan Dienes ORCID
This paper was not found in any repository, but could be made available legally by the author.
This paper was not found in any repository, but could be made available legally by the author.

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Abstract

To get evidence for or against a theory relative to the null hypothesis, one needs to know what the theory predicts. The amount of evidence can then be quantified by a Bayes factor. Specifying the sizes of the effect one’s theory predicts may not come naturally, but I show some ways of thinking about the problem, some simple heuristics that are often useful when one has little relevant prior information. These heuristics include the room-to-move heuristic (for comparing mean differences), the ratio-of-scales heuristic (for regression slopes), the ratio-of-means heuristic (for regression slopes), the basic-effect heuristic (for analysis of variance effects), and the total-effect heuristic (for mediation analysis).