The odd case when cognitive biases are more prevalent in researchers than in samples
Walmsley and Gilbey (2016) reported on the impact of cognitive biases on pilots’ decision-making, concluding that there was strong evidence that cognitive bias impacted decision making thus putting pilots' lives in danger. However, their methodology was not free of the same biases they set to research and, more importantly, they relied far too much on statistical significance as the only standard for result interpretation. Consequently, while the results obtained may have been technically correct, their divorce from the underlying methodological context made them factually wrong. Therefore, the conclusions achieved also misrepresented the true impact of cognitive biases on pilots' decision-making.