Jonathan Baron wrote:

On the other side, are those from (e.g.) experimental psychology,
> where the name of the game is to design experiments that are so well
> controlled that the null hypothesis will be true if the effect of
> interest is absent.  As a member of this group, when I read people
> from the first group, I find it very discouraging.  It is almost as if
> they are saying that what I work so hard to try to do is impossible.
>

Perhaps I misunderstood this, but how could p-values in standard hypothesis
testing help you demonstrate that the null hypothesis is in fact true.
AFAIK, if I really wanted to argue for the null the best way is to use
(bio-)equivalence testing... I'm thinking of the article (and works cited
there):

The Abuse of Power: The Pervasive Fallacy of Power Calculations for Data
Analysis, John M. Hoenig and Dennis M. Heisey. The American Statistician,
Vol. 55, No. 1 (Feb., 2001), pp. 19-24.

-- 
Professor Dr. Shravan Vasishth
Empirical Methods in Syntax
Institute for Linguistics, Potsdam, Germany
Tel: +49-(0)331-977-2016, -2457 Fax: -2087
http://www.ling.uni-potsdam.de/~vasishth

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