“P-hacking” sounds like some sort of dark-web-cryptocurrency-type activity. But, in fact, it’s a shady practice from a different sphere: the pseudoscientific manipulation of a study to produce a desirable result. Coined by psychologists Uri Simonsohn, Joseph Simmons and Leif Nelson almost a decade ago, the “p” comes from “p-value,” a number given to research to show how likely the results could have come about by chance. 

A value lower than 0.05 (5%) allows researchers to declare their findings as “statistically significant,” thus considerably increasing the likelihood of their work being published. Rather than setting out to prove a hypothesis, p-hacking means looking at the data and working backward to find out what hypothesis it could possibly prove.¹ If a research...