Psychology Faculty Overestimate the Magnitude of Cohen’s d Effect Sizes by Half a Standard Deviation

Abstract

In this experiment, we recruited 261 psychology faculty to determine the extent to which they were able to visually estimate the overlap of two distributions given a Cohen’s d effect size; and vice-versa estimate d given two distributions of varying overlap. In a pre-test, participants in both conditions over-estimated effect sizes by half a standard deviation on average. No significant differences in estimation accuracy by psychology sub-field were found, but having taught statistics coursework was a significant predictor of better performance. After a short training session, participants improved substantially on both tasks on the post-test, with 63% reduction in absolute error and negligible overall bias (98% bias reduction). Furthermore, post-test performance indicated that learning transferred across answering modes. Teachers of statistics might find it beneficial to include a short exercise (less than 10 minutes) requiring the visual estimation of effect sizes in statistics coursework to better train future psychology researchers.