
We are constantly bombarded by information, and finding a way to filter that information in an objective way is crucial to surviving this onslaught with your sanity intact. This is what statistics, and logic we use in it, enables us to do. Through the lens of statistics, we learn to find the signal hidden in the noise when it is there and to know when an apparent trend or pattern is really just randomness. The study of statistics involves math and relies upon calculations of numbers. But it also relies heavily on how the numbers are chosen and how the statistics are interpreted.

This work was created as part of the University of Missouri’s Affordable and Open Access Educational Resources Initiative (https://www.umsystem.edu/ums/aa/oer). The contents of this work have been adapted from the following Open Access Resources: Online Statistics Education: A Multimedia Course of Study (http://onlinestatbook.com/). Project Leader: David M. Lane, Rice University. Changes to the original works were made by Dr. Garett C. Foster in the Department of Psychological Sciences to tailor the text to fit the needs of the introductory statistics course for psychology majors at the University of Missouri – St. Louis. Materials from the original sources have been combined, reorganized, and added to by the current author, and any conceptual, mathematical, or typographical errors are the responsibility of the current author.

• Garett C. Foster, University of Missouri-St. LouisFollow
• David Lane, Rice UniversityFollow
• David Scott, Rice University
• Mikki Hebl, Rice University
• Rudy Guerra, Rice University
• Dan Osherson, Rice University
• Heidi Zimmer, University of Houston, Downtown Campus

## Recommended Citation

Foster, Garett C.; Lane, David; Scott, David; Hebl, Mikki; Guerra, Rudy; Osherson, Dan; and Zimmer, Heidi, "An Introduction to Psychological Statistics" (2018). Open Educational Resources Collection. 4.
https://irl.umsl.edu/oer/4