Hypothesis Testing from a Bayesian Perspective

摘要

Bayesian inference provides a general framework for testing hypotheses. It is a normative method, in the sense of prescribing how hypotheses should be tested. However, it may also be used descriptively, by characterizing people's actual hypothesis-testing behavior in terms of its consistency with or departures from the model. Such a characterization may facilitate the development of psychological accounts of how that behavior is produced (i.e., as the result of failed attempts to act in a Bayesian fashion, as the result of attempts of process information in non-Bayesian ways. This essay exploits the descriptive potential of Bayesian inference. First, it identifies a set of logically possible forms of non-Bayesian behavior. Second, it reviews existing research in a variety of areas in order to see whether these possibilities are ever realized. The analysis shows that in some situations, several apparently distinct phenomena are usefully viewed as special cases of the same kind of behavior, whereas in other situations previous investigations have conferred a common label (e.g., confirmation bias) to several distinct phenomena. It also calls into question a number of attributions of judgmental bias, suggesting that in some cases the bias is different than what has previously been claimed, whereas in others, there may be no bias at all. (Author)