Such low correlation coefficients may come as a surprise if you are used to reading about findings that are presented as “statistically significant” or even “highly significant.” Statistical terms are often misleading to the lay reader, and “significant” may be the worst example of this. When a finding is described as “significant,” we should not conclude that the effect it describes is a strong one. It simply means that the finding is unlikely to be the product of chance alone. With a sufficiently large sample, a correlation can be at once very “significant” and too small to be worth
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