Many Neuroscience Studies May Be Based on Bad Statistics | Wired Science | Wired.com

Many Neuroscience Studies May Be Based on Bad Statistics | Wired Science | Wired.com: Many researchers consider a statistical power of 80 percent to be a desirable goal in designing a study. At that level, if an effect of a particular size were genuine, the study would detect it 80 percent of the time.

But roughly half of the neuroscience studies Munafò and colleagues included in their analysis had a statistical power below 20 percent. Those studies would fail to detect a genuine effect at least 80 percent of the time...

“It was already clear that fMRI studies were almost always very underpowered, but this paper shows that just about everything except a set of studies described as “neurological” are also underpowered,” Pashler said.