? CAUSE, PROVE: The words “cause” and “prove” are problem words and need extra caution in scientific writing. Demonstrating causality requires much more than a single statistical test (authors should do some background reading on this issue). Using a null hypothesis testing procedure means that we can never “prove” any hypothesis, because all we get is a probability that the null hypothesis can be rejected. Therefore, there is always a possibility, perhaps small, that we might be rejecting the null hypothesis in error (it might, in fact, be correct – this is known as a Type I error).
