P-values don’t measure evidence

Michael Lavine

Communications in Statistics - Theory and Methods, 2024, vol. 53, issue 2, 718-726

Abstract: Despite much writing about the uses and misuses of p-values, one point is frequently misunderstood: p-values do not measure evidence. Even so, the statistics literature often says that p-values do measure evidence. The purpose of the present article is to argue through several examples that p-values do not measure evidence. This article is not about other aspects of p-values. Specifically, it is not about sharp cutoffs, effect sizes, decision making, or other potential measures of evidence. We felt compelled to write about whether p-values measure evidence because it is our opinion that misunderstanding evidence and how to measure it contributes to misunderstanding science and to the so-called replication crisis.

Date: 2024
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DOI: 10.1080/03610926.2022.2091783

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