Paper by Rink Hoekstra and Simine Vazire: “The replication crisis in the social, behavioural, and life sciences has spurred a reform movement aimed at increasing the credibility of scientific studies. Many of these credibility-enhancing reforms focus, appropriately, on specific research and publication practices. A less often mentioned aspect of credibility is the need for intellectual humility, or being transparent about and owning the limitations of our work. Although intellectual humility is presented as a widely accepted scientific norm, we argue that current research practice does not incentivize intellectual humility. We provide a set of recommendations on how to increase intellectual humility in research articles and highlight the central role peer reviewers can play in incentivizing authors to foreground the flaws and uncertainty in their work, thus enabling full and transparent evaluation of the validity of research…
A recent editorial in Nature Human Behaviour laments the fact that academia prefers clear and polished stories over honest but less clear-cut ones, with “research projects [presented] as conclusive narratives that leave no room for ambiguity or for conflicting or inconclusive results” (p. 1). Although honesty and clarity are not mutually exclusive, the pressure resulting from this probably impacts the quality and validity of our scientific work. Most journals still seem to favor clear stories, despite an arguably larger risk of these having validity issues. This presents a real dilemma for authors – especially those who do not have the luxury of a tenured position – who would like to put intellectual humility front and center: In order to increase the odds of getting a publication, they are encouraged to present their stories as better than they actually are. Being more honest or humble likely has a negative effect on their CVs. In the following, we’ll present a constructive solution for this apparent stalemate, which reverses the reward structure in such a way that authors are encouraged to write papers that “tell it like it is”….(More)”.