Statistical reasoning is an art and so demands both mathematical knowledge and informed judgment. When it is mechanized, as with the institutionalized hybrid logic, it becomes ritual, not reasoning. Many colleagues have argued that it is not going to be easy to get researchers in psychology and other sociobiomedical sciences to drop this comforting crutch unless one offers an easy-to-use substitute. But this is exactly what I want to avoid - the substitution of one mechanistic dogma for another. It is our duty to inform our students of the many good roads to statistical inference that exist and to teach them how to use informed judgment to decide which one to follow for a particular problem. At the very least, this chapter can serve as a tool in arguments with people who think they have to defend a ritualistic dogma instead of good statistical reasoning. Making and winning such arguments is indispensable to good science.
The CAUSE Research Group is supported in part by a member initiative grant from the American Statistical Association’s Section on Statistics and Data Science Education