On Science and the Discriminative Law of Effect

Abstract

This article considers the process of the dissemination of scientific findings from the point of view of the discriminative law of effect. We assume that the purpose of science is to describe the state of the world in an unbiased and accurate manner. We then consider a number of challenges to the unbiased consensual development of science that arise from differences between science that is done, submitted for publication, and published. These challenges arise from the differential reinforcers for both research and publication delivered by journals and editors for novel results, the undervaluation of systematic replication and findings of invariance, and general lack of reinforcers for failed replications. All these challenges bias science toward searching for, reporting, and valuing novel results and consequently lead to a biased and erroneous view of the world. We suggest that science should be approached more conservatively, and that a reevaluation of the value of replication, and especially failed replication, is in order.

Failure to Replicate the “Work Ethic” Effect in Pigeons

“…Although failed replications such as ours are often regarded (at least implicitly) as less newsworthy than demonstrations of novel effects, Davison and Nevin (2005) argue that this sort of bias, and the reinforcement contingencies from which they arise, can foster inaccurate representations of psychological processes and phenomena. At a minimum, then, our findings should leave open (or reopen) the question of whether a pigeon's prior effort enhances the conditioned reinforcing properties of stimuli that follow such effort.…”

“…Once again, however, we did not obtain the preference effects they reported. Considering what we view as an extensive and thorough effort at replication, we are reporting our null findings to underscore the elusiveness of the work ethic effect and the possibility that the original findings may have been a Type I error (Davison & Nevin, 2005). Clement et al (2000) trained pigeons on two simultaneous discriminations in which the discriminative stimuli (S+ FR1 and S2 FR1 ) for one task were obtained by pecking once to a center-key stimulus and those for the other task (S+ FR20 and S2 FR20 ) were obtained by pecking 20 times to that same initial stimulus.…”

Within‐trial Contrast: When Is a Failure to Replicate Not a Type I Error?

“…Vasconcelos et al propose that the lack of reliability suggests that our finding may be attributable to a Type I Error-the 1 chance in 20 that the difference found was, in fact, not different from chance. Vasconcelos et al cite Davison and Nevin (2005) who argue that positive findings are more easily published than negative findings.…”

Why Selective Publication of Statistically Significant Results Can Be Effective

“…Davison and Nevin [23], for example, recommend that editors and reviewers should not be biased towards publishing novel or different results, but should publish also null results. Ioannidis [24] envisions a future ideal in which we publish everything to make “the scientific record complete rather than fragmented and opportunistic”.…”