Abstract
Descriptive vs. inferential cheating
Highlights
What is descriptive and inferential cheating? Descriptive cheating involves the false reporting of descriptive data, such as sample means, proportions, standard deviations, and so on
My conclusion that inferential cheating causes only limited harm is based on demonstrations that the null hypothesis significance testing procedure (NHSTP) is invalid
In most empirical psychology articles, the null hypothesis refers to a single value
Summary
What is descriptive and inferential cheating? Descriptive cheating involves the false reporting of descriptive data, such as sample means, proportions, standard deviations, and so on. The harm of descriptive cheating is obvious, has been demonstrated by previous scandals, and needs no further elaboration here. When a researcher cheats inferentially, the descriptive data are true but the reported p-values (and associated t-tests, F-tests, and so on) are not.
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