system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
How do so many experimental psychology papers get away with n=15?

I've been reading a lot of papers for my thesis lately and I keep seeing papers (that aren't pilot studies) with sample sizes between 15 and 30. How is that even remotely enough to draw inferences from? Shouldn't there be problems with random noise not canceling itself out due to the small sample size?
gpt
The necessary sample size depends on what you're trying to estimate, and with what precision. Psychology has a problem with low power in general, but it's hard to speak generally about "getting away with n=15" without specifying what kind of experiment we're talking about. There are many results in psychology that are perfectly replicable with a sample that small, and many experiment that should probably be conducted with much larger samples.