Bayesian Meta-Analysis: The Wrong Way and The Right Way

Carlsson, R., Schimmack, U., Williams, D.R., & Bürkner, P. C. (in press). Bayesian Evidence Synthesis is no substitute for meta-analysis: a re-analysis of Scheibehenne, Jamil and Wagenmakers (2016). Psychological Science.

In short, we show that the reported Bayes-Factor of 36 in the original article is inflated by pooling across a heterogeneous set of studies, using a one-sided prior, and assuming a fixed effect size.  We present an alternative Bayesian multi-level approach that avoids the pitfalls of Bayesian Evidence Synthesis, and show that the original set of studies produced at best weak evidence for an effect of social norms on reusing of towels.

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