On the White, the Black, and the Many Shades of Gray in Between: Our Reply to Van Ravenzwaaij and Wagenmakers (2021)

In 2019 we wrote an article (Tendeiro & Kiers, 2019) in Psychological Methods over null hypothesis Bayesian testing and its working horse, the Bayes factor. Recently, van Ravenzwaaij and Wagenmakers (2021) offered a response to our piece, also in this journal. Although we do welcome their contribution with thought-provoking remarks on our article, we ended up concluding that there were too many "issues" in van Ravenzwaaij and Wagenmakers (2021) that warrant a rebuttal. In this article we both defend the main premises of our original article and we put the contribution of van Ravenzwaaij and Wagenmakers (2021) under critical appraisal. Our hope is that this exchange between scholars decisively contributes toward a better understanding among psychologists of null hypothesis Bayesian testing in general and of the Bayes factor in particular. Translational AbstractIn 2019 we wrote an article about the Bayes factor, which is the Bayesian tool of election for testing statistical hypotheses. We offered a critical appraisal of the Bayes factor that was missing in the published literature. Don van Ravenzwaaij and Eric-Jan Wagenmakers wrote a rebuttal to our paper. In their reply, their disagreement with several of our key remarks became apparent. However, and very importantly, several points made in the rebuttal are either unclear or simply do not reflect our own views and writings. The current article is a commentary aiming at clarifying some points of confusion that readers may have after reading the previous two articles. It is our hope that practitioners interested in adding Bayesian hypothesis testing to their toolkit do so in the most informed way possible, taking both the advantages as well as the downsides of the Bayes factor into account.