The most straightforward consequence of underpowered studies (i.e., those with low probability of detecting an effect of practical importance) is that effects of practical importance are not detected.
But there is a second, more subtle consequence: underpowered studies result in a larger variance of the estimates of the parameter being estimated. For example, in estimating a population mean, the sample means of studies with low power have high variance; in other words, the sampling distribution of sample means is wide. This is illustrated in the following picture, which shows the sampling distributions for a variable with zero mean when sample size n = 25 (red) and when n = 100 (blue). The vertical lines toward the right of each sampling distribution show the cut-off for a one-sided hypothesis test with null hypothesis µ = 0 and significance level alpha = .05. Notice that