Related papers: The Natural Selection of Bad Science

Scientific progress is inherently sequential: collective knowledge is updated as new studies enter the literature. We propose the sequential meta-analysis research trace (SMART), which quantifies the influence of each study at the time it…

Distorted science communication harms individuals and society as it can lead to unhealthy behavior change and decrease trust in scientific institutions. Given the rapidly increasing volume of science communication in recent years, a…

Decision support systems based on prediction sets help humans solve multiclass classification tasks by narrowing down the set of potential label values to a subset of them, namely a prediction set, and asking them to always predict label…

Some empirical results are more likely to be published than others. Such selective publication leads to biased estimates and distorted inference. This paper proposes two approaches for identifying the conditional probability of publication…

Scientific knowledge develops through cumulative discoveries that build on, contradict, contextualize, or correct prior findings. Scientists and journalists often communicate these incremental findings to lay people through visualizations…

Motivated reasoning posits that people distort how they process information in the direction of beliefs they find attractive. This paper creates a novel experimental design to identify motivated reasoning from Bayesian updating when people…

Quantitative research relies heavily on coding, and coding errors are relatively common even in published research. In this paper, we examine whether individuals are more or less likely to check their code depending on the results they…

Causality is a fundamental part of the scientific endeavour to understand the world. Unfortunately, causality is still taboo in much of psychology and social science. Motivated by a growing number of recommendations for the importance of…

This paper calls on the research community not only to investigate how human biases are inherited by large language models (LLMs) but also to explore how these biases in LLMs can be leveraged to make society's "unwritten code" - such as…

Contemporary scientific research is a distributed, collaborative endeavor, carried out by teams of researchers, regulatory institutions, funding agencies, commercial partners, and scientific bodies, all interacting with each other and…

Faculty at prestigious institutions dominate scientific discourse, with the small proportion of researchers at elite universities producing a disproportionate share of all research publications. Environmental prestige is known to drive such…

Cognitive biases have been studied in psychology, sociology, and behavioral economics for decades. Traditionally, they have been considered a negative human trait that leads to inferior decision-making, reinforcement of stereotypes, or can…

Preprocessing forms an oft-neglected foundation for a wide range of statistical and scientific analyses. However, it is rife with subtleties and pitfalls. Decisions made in preprocessing constrain all later analyses and are typically…

Scientific publishing systematically filters out negative results. We argue that this long-standing asymmetry has become an urgent problem in the era of large language models, which inherit the positive bias of the literature they are…

The Hot Stove Effect is a negativity bias resulting from the adaptive character of learning. The mechanism is that learning algorithms that pursue alternatives with positive estimated values, but avoid alternatives with negative estimated…

Inference is the process of using facts we know to learn about facts we do not know. A theory of inference gives assumptions necessary to get from the former to the latter, along with a definition for and summary of the resulting…

Scientific publications enable results and ideas to be transmitted throughout the scientific community. The number and type of journal publications also have become the primary criteria used in evaluating career advancement. Our analysis…

Learning underlies nearly all human behavior and is central to education and education reform. Although recent advances in neuroscience have revealed the fundamental structure of learning processes, these insights have yet to be integrated…

Widespread deployment of societal-scale machine learning systems necessitates a thorough understanding of the resulting long-term effects these systems have on their environment, including loss of trustworthiness, bias amplification, and…

Confidence is an essential ingredient of success in a wide range of domains ranging from job performance and mental health, to sports, business, and combat. Some authors have suggested that not just confidence but overconfidence-believing…