An extended refutation text and funny videos reduce notorious p-value misconceptions

Abstract

Abstract For many decades, the vast majority of psychology students and their supervisors alike have been prone to misunderstanding the p -value, such as confusing it with a hypothesis’ probability. The present paper offers three innovative contributions to address this problem: (1) A novel yet valid methodological approach to assess p- value misconceptions that combines correctness and subjective certainty. (2) An effective short-term digital intervention built around an extended refutation text to reduce those misconceptions in about 10 min. (3) An unorthodox humor intervention with funny videos for extra effectiveness (and chuckles). A sample of 157 undergraduate psychology students ( M age = 23.36) took part in an online experiment featuring a 2×2-factorial design (funny vs. neutral videos and intervention vs. control condition. Planned contrast analyses revealed a large positive effect of the digital intervention on the participants’ conceptual change score. Furthermore, the prior presentation of funny videos did indeed yield an additional positive effect. Overall, the findings demonstrate the potential of extended refutation texts (enhanced with funny videos) for a short and convenient digital refresher aimed at psychology students who had already taken an introductory course but needed further clarification to tackle p- value misconceptions.