The Null Hypothesis The null hypothesis, as described by Anthony Greenwald in ‘Consequences of Prejudice Against the Null Hypothesis,’ is the hypothesis of no difference between treatment effects or of no association between variables. Unfortunately in academia, the ‘null’ is often associated with ‘insignificant,’ ‘no value,’ or ‘invalid.’ This association is due to the bias against papers that accept the null hypothesis by journals. This prejudice by journals to only accept papers that show ‘significant’ results (aka rejecting this ‘null hypothesis’) puts added pressure on those working in academia, especially with their relevance and salaries often depend on publications. This pressure may also be correlated with increased scientific misconduct, which you can also read more about on this website by clicking here. If you would like to read publication, journal articles, and blogs about the null hypothesis, views on rejecting and accepting the null, and journal bias against the null hypothesis, please see the resources we have linked below. Journal of Negative Results, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Journal of Negative Results in BioMedicine Positively Negative: A New PLOS ONE Collection focusing on Negative, Null and Inconclusive Results Journal of Interesting Negative Results in Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning