Confidence intervals: What they are and are not

Over at the Psychonomic Society Featured Content blog, there are several new articles outlining some of our work on confidence intervals published previously in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. In a three-part series, Steve Lewandosky and Alexander Etz lay out our case for why confidence intervals are not what people think they are. I've written enough about confidence intervals lately, so I'll just link you to their articles.

• Part 1 (Steve Lewandowsky): The 95% Stepford Interval: Confidently not what it appears to be. Lewandowsky lays out the basic idea of a confidence interval, what people expect it to be, and how that is wrong.
• Part 2 (Steve Lewandowsky): When you could be sure that the submarine is yellow, it’ll frequentistly appear red, blue, or green. Lewandowsky digs deeper into some strangeness in confidence intervals, caused by the fact that they guarantee certain behavior in the long run, but do not guarantee any reasonable post-data inferences.
• Part 3 (Alexander Etz): Confidence intervals? More like confusion intervals. Etz summarizes the problems with the confidence interval advocacy literature, including incorrect (even contradictory) interpretations of confidence intervals.

Check it out, and don't forget that Morey et al (2015, 2015a) are open access!

Morey, R. D., Hoekstra, R., Rouder, J. N., Lee, M. D., & Wagenmakers, E.-J. (2015). The Fallacy of Placing Confidence in Confidence Intervals. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, doi: 10.3758/s13423-015-0947-8.

Morey, R. D., Hoekstra, R., Rouder, J. N., & Wagenmakers, E.-J. (2015). Continued misinterpretation of confidence intervals: response to Miller and Ulrich. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, doi: 10.3758/s13423-015-0955-8.