Comments on Oakes on the Foundations of Statistical Inference in the Social and Behavioral Sciences: The Market for Statistical Significance

A recent book by psychologist M. Oakes (1986) surveys the practice and logical foundations of statistical tests in the social and behavioral sciences. The book is aimed at producers and consumers of statistical research reports in these disciplines and has as its objective a shift in common practice from “significance” tests (however interpreted) to their more complete and informative analogs, confidence intervals. Much is made of the writings of the great English scientist and statistician Sir Ronald Fisher, to whom, most of all, the received theory of statistical tests is due. Oakes misrepresents Fisher's position on points of logic. There is also some overstatement of the case for confidence intervals. More interesting is the author's positive explanation for the widespread acceptance of significance tests among applied researchers, for there is no less settled logic or scheme of inference within theoretical statistics, as instantiated by the current papers of Casella and Berger (1987) and Berger and Sellke (1987) in the Journal of the American Statistical Association. That research workers in applied fields continue to use significance tests routinely may be explained by forces of supply and demand in the market for statistical evidence, where the commodity traded is not so much evidence, but “statistical significance.”