B. F. Skinner Quotes

If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.

Statistics is, or should be, about scientific investigation and how to do it better, but many statisticians believe it is a branch of mathematics. Now I agree that the physicist, the chemist, the engineer, and the statistician can never know too much mathematics, but their objectives should be better physics, better chemistry, better engineering, and in the case of statistics, better scientific investigation. Whether in any given study this implies more or less mathematics is incidental.

At the beginning of all experimental work stands the choice of the appropriate technique of investigation.

What's nice about experiments is that they are much more closely tied to what theorists think about the world than normal empirical research. You can design your experiment to exactly ask the question you want to ask. This is not true about normal empirical research.

If you're a social scientist worth your salt, you never do a univariate analysis.

Experiment is fundamentally only induced observation.

... the actual and physical conduct of an experiment must govern the statistical procedure of its interpretation.

Even one well-made observation will be enough in many cases, just as one well-constructed experiment often suffices for the establishment of a law.

In the realm of scientific observation, luck is granted only to those who are prepared.

I soon became convinced... that all the theorizing would be empty brain exercise and therefore a waste of time unless one first ascertained what the population of the universe really consists of.

We should teach the students, as well as executives, how to conduct experiments, how to examine data, and how to use these tools to make better decisions.

Traditional market researchers are cold and calculating and scientific.

All of the studies we do in my group are quantified.

Indeed, every true science has for its object the determination of certain phenomena by means of others, in accordance with the relations which exist between them.

These syllables, about 2,300 in number, were mixed together and then drawn out by chance and used to construct series of different lengths, several of which each time formed the material for a test.

Statistics is the plural of anecdote.

No one believes an hypothesis except its originator but everyone believes an experiment except the experimenter. Most people are ready to believe something based on experiment but the experimenter knows the many little things that could have gone wrong in the experiment. For this reason the discoverer of a new fact seldom feels quite so confident of it as others do.

There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge available to us: observation of nature, reflection, and experimentation. Observation collects facts; reflection combines them; experimentation verifies the result of that combination.

A poll survey should indicate at the outset whether it is meant to capture opinions and beliefs for preferences and practices or value and perceptions.

When I started in the nineties, a sample size was a 4 and a 6.

If one in twenty does not seem high enough odds, we may, if we prefer it, draw the line at one in fifty (the 2 per cent. point), or one in a hundred (the 1 per cent. point). Personally, the writer prefers to set a low standard of significance at the 5 per cent. point, and ignore entirely all results which fail to reach this level. A scientific fact should be regarded as experimentally established only if a properly designed experiment rarely fails to give this level of significance.

Experimental observations are only experience carefully planned in advance, and designed to form a secure basis of new knowledge.

[Coining phrase "null hypothesis"] In relation to any experiment we may speak of this hypothesis as the "null hypothesis," and it should be noted that the null hypothesis is never proved or established, but is possibly disproved, in the course of experimentation. Every experiment may be said to exist only in order to give the facts a chance of disproving the null hypothesis.

A good hypothesis in science must have other properties than those of the phenomenon it is immediately invoked to explain, otherwise it is not prolific enough.

For first of all we must prepare a Natural and Experimental History, sufficient and good; and this is the foundation of all; for we are not to imagine or suppose, but to discover, what nature does or may be made to do.