26. Conclusions in Hypothesis Testing

The word accept is one that is avoided when making statements regarding the null and alternative. You are not stating that one of the hypotheses is true. Rather, you are making a decision based on the likelihood of your data coming from the null hypothesis with regard to your type I error threshold.

Therefore, the wording used in conclusions of hypothesis testing includes: We reject the null hypothesis or We fail to reject the null hypothesis . This lends itself to the idea that you start with the null hypothesis true by default, and "choosing" the null at the end of the test would have been the choice even if no data were collected.