A while back a colleague forwarded me this quote from Stanley Schachter (yes that Stanley Schachter):
“This is a difference which is significant at considerably better than the p < .0001 level of confidence. If, in reeling off these zeroes, we manage to create the impression of stringing pearls on a necklace, we rather hope the reader will be patient and forbearing, for it has been the very number of zeros after this decimal point that has compelled us to treat these data with complete seriousness.”
The quote comes from a chapter on birth order in Schachter’s 1959 book The Psychology of Affiliation. The analysis was a chi-square test on 76 subjects. The subjects were selected from 3 different experiments for being “truly anxious” and combined for this analysis. True anxiety was determined if the subject scored at one or the other extreme endpoint of an anxiety scale (both complete denial and complete admission were taken to mean that the subject is “truly anxious”), and/or if the subject discontinued participation because the experiment made them feel too anxious.
The Hardest Science 