Covariate Misuse: P-Hacking Your Way To Fame | Part 4 of 6

Covariate Misuse. This video is part of a series of videos on p-hacking, what it is, and why it’s so dangerous for science. I give a pretty detailed high-level explanation of p-hacking in the first video in this series, so if you’re not familiar with the idea, please have a look there first. I’ll put a link to that video below. But in a few seconds, researchers are motivated to get what’s called a p-value to be below a threshold of .05. If they do that, their findings are considered meaningful and they can typically publish their results. If they don’t, well all their work is largely wasted. And to get those p-values below .05, there are some very dubious and unethical approaches they can take. In this video, we’ll dig in to one of those unethical approaches that researchers can use to p-hack their data…by selectively using covariates in their analyses.

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Welcome to Data Demystified. I’m Jeff Galak and today we’ll dig deeper into p-hacking so that you can understand how to spot it when you see research results and avoid it when you do the research yourself. The goal here is to build intuition, so we’ll avoid heavy duty math and statistics, and focus on what you really need to know.

P-Hacking Series Playlist:

Video 1: P-Hacking Explained (Released on 6/24/2021):
Video 2: Dropping Conditions that “Work” (Released on 7/1/2021):
Video 3: Multiple Measures Misuse (Released on 7/8/2021):
Video 4: Covariate Misuse (Released on 7/15/2021):
Video 5: Selective Stopping Rules (Released on 7/22/2021):
Video 6: P-Curve (Released on 7/29/2021):

Link to video about statistical significance testing:

Link to video about randomized experiments and causation:

Link to video about False Positives:

Link to academic paper by Simmons, Nelson and Simonhson:

Link to academic paper by John, Lowenstein, and Prelec:

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Equipment Used for Filming:
Nikon D7100:
Softlight:
Yeti Microphone:
iPad for Teleprompter:
Camtasia for Video Editing: