I was asked by Stephan Lewandowski of the Psychonomic Society to contribute to a discussion of confidence intervals for their Featured Content blog. The purpose of the digital event was to consider the implications of some recent papers published in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, and I gladly took the opportunity to highlight the widespread confusion surrounding interpretations of confidence intervals. And let me tell you, there is a lot of confusion.

Here are the posts in the series:

Part 1 (By Lewandowski): The 95% Stepford Interval: Confidently not what it appears to be

Part 2 (By Lewandowski): When you could be sure that the submarine is yellow, it’ll frequentistly appear red, blue, or green

Part 3 (By Me): Confidence intervals? More like confusion intervals

Check them out! Lewandowski mainly sticks to the content of the papers in question, but I’m a free-spirit stats blogger and went a little bit more broad with my focus. I end my post with an appeal to Bayesian statistics, which I think are much more intuitive and seem to answer the exact kinds of questions people think confidence intervals answer.

And remember, try out JASP for Bayesian analysis made easy — and it also does most classic stats — for free! Much better than SPSS, and it automatically produces APA formatted tables (this alone is worth the switch)!

Aside: This is not the first time I have written about confidence intervals. See my short series (well, 2 posts) on this blog called “Can confidence intervals save psychology?” part 1 and part 2. I would also like to point out Michael Lee’s excellent commentary on (takedown of?) “The new statistics” (PDF link).