Power or Alpha? The Better Way of Decreasing the False Discovery Rate

The replication crisis in psychology led to an increased concern regarding the falsediscovery rate (FDR) - the proportion of false positives findings among all significant findings. In this article, we compare two previously proposed solutions for decreasing the FDR: increasing statistical power and decreasing significance level α. First, we provide an intuitive explanation for α, power, and FDR to improve the understanding of these concepts. Then, we investigate the relationship between α and power to compare the efficiency of those solutions. We show that reducing α is more efficient than increasing power in reducing the FDR. We suggest that researchers interested in reducing the FDR should decrease α rather than increase power. This connects the literature on this topic and has implications for increasing the reproducibility of psychological science.