Title: Tradeoff-Neglect in the Evidentiary Value Movement: On the Perils of Viewing

Specific Means as Sacred Values

Speaker: Eli J. Finkel, Northwestern University

Abstract: Since 2011, the evidentiary value movement has sent shock-waves through
psychological science, fundamentally altering research practices, publication policies,
and confidence levels in the validity of the research in our field. These are welcome
developments, as they hold promise for increasing the evidentiary value of our science.
However, successfully pursuing the goal of optimizing evidentiary value requires
complex tradeoffs among many distinct means. For example, raising publication
standards will reduce false-positive errors, but it will increase false-negative errors.
Requiring infinite transparency can help readers gain comprehensive knowledge of all
methodological and statistical details (including the perhaps thousands of ultimately
irrelevant analyses), but it threatens to bloat scholarly reports and require significant
additional time investment from authors. Treating any particular means as a sacred
valuerather than as a desirable approachassaults the sorts of subtlety and nuance that
will be required for us to harness the best outcomes from the movement. This
presentation introduces the idea of tradeoff-neglect, a phenomenon in which much of the
discussion in the movement treats certain means as sacred values and, consequently,
neglects the downsides of these means. The presentation concludes with a full-throated
endorsement of the evidentiary value movementespecially the implications for
practices like larger sample sizes and greater transparencywhile simultaneously
underscoring the perils of widespread tradeoff neglect within the movement.