A paper in Psychological Science was taking a beating on Twitter last month.

Party like it is 2011 at Psychological Science. P-values are either in the Goldilocks range (0.03-0.05) or p<.001 with an effect size of d = 0.9. Sitting in a dim vs light room has a bigger effect on thinking you'll get the flu than that emotion manipulations have on mood. Right. pic.twitter.com/neNlZGp5Vl

— Daniël Lakens (@lakens) June 5, 2018

In this post, I’m not going to talk about the paper itself but rather, about how it came to be published and how preregistration – a concept I have long advocated – may be being misused.

The paper reports on five studies which all address the same general question. Of these, Study #3 was preregistered and the authors write that it was performed after