Competition for priority harms the reliability of science, but reforms can help

Incentives for priority of discovery are hypothesized to harm scientific reliability. Here, we evaluate this hypothesis by developing an evolutionary agent-based model of a competitive scientific process. We find that rewarding priority of discovery causes populations to culturally evolve towards co...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Nature human behaviour 2021-07, Vol.5 (7), p.857-867
Main Authors: Tiokhin, Leonid, Yan, Minhua, Morgan, Thomas J. H.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
4014/477/2811
631/477/2811
706/689/159
Behavioral Sciences
Biomedical and Life Sciences
Careers
Coherence
Competition
Competitive Behavior
Discovery
Evolution
Experimental Psychology
Humans
Incentives
Life Sciences
Microeconomics
Motivation
Neurosciences
Personality and Social Psychology
Reforms
Registries
Reliability
Reproducibility of Results
Reward
Sample size
Scientists
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Incentives for priority of discovery are hypothesized to harm scientific reliability. Here, we evaluate this hypothesis by developing an evolutionary agent-based model of a competitive scientific process. We find that rewarding priority of discovery causes populations to culturally evolve towards conducting research with smaller samples. This reduces research reliability and the information value of the average study. Increased start-up costs for setting up single studies and increased payoffs for secondary results (also known as scoop protection) attenuate the negative effects of competition. Furthermore, large rewards for negative results promote the evolution of smaller sample sizes. Our results confirm the logical coherence of scoop protection reforms at several journals. Our results also imply that reforms to increase scientific efficiency, such as rapid journal turnaround times, may produce collateral damage by incentivizing lower-quality research; in contrast, reforms that increase start-up costs, such as pre-registration and registered reports, may generate incentives for higher-quality research. Using an agent-based model, Tiokhin, Yan and Morgan find that competition for priority harms the reliability of science. Their model highlights several potential solutions, including scoop protection and larger start-up costs for research.
ISSN:2397-3374
2397-3374
DOI:10.1038/s41562-020-01040-1