Uri Simonsohn, a professor at Penn who’s a leader in the study of replicability, calls these practices “p-hacking.” Hacking the p isn’t usually as crude as I’ve made it out to be, and it’s seldom malicious. The p-hackers truly believe in their hypotheses, just as the Bible coders do, and when you’re a believer, it’s easy to come up with reasons that the analysis that gives a publishable p-value is the one you should have done in the first place.
