Do Only Economists Rely on Statistical Significance?

Abstract

Economists, like other scientists, routinely rely on classical statistical inference to form expectations on whether a claim holds in academic research, with significance levels such as 0.05 being assigned special meaning. We present experimental evidence suggesting that most people are also belief conservative and that, if the degree of belief conservatism is restricted to a single value, the resulting hypothesis testing occurs using a 0.05 significance level for those subjects who are not best described by rational expectations.

Keywords: statistical significance, expectations, belief conservatism, experiment

JEL Classification: B41, C91, D84