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“Bias and prejudice are attitudes to be kept in hand, not attitudes to be avoided.”
Academic psychology has been forced to do some self-examination of late, not only in the wake of high-profile cases of scientific fraud but also after the widely reported publication of some dubious results. The work of Daryl which appeared to find parapsychological abilities such as clairvoyance in the general student population has had an impact not only on the academic literature, but also on the way that psychology experiments are published and publicized. When Bem's experiments were repeated by Ritchie, Wiseman, and French, researchers who were dubious about his results, they did not find evidence of the parapsychological abilities that he did. But they struggled to find a journal that was willing to publish their results, as they were a repetition of previously published work.
This throws into the spotlight one of academic science's biggest problems—the bias inherent in which results are published and which results never see the light of day. Known as the “file-drawer problem,” this occurs as experiments that yield strong, positive, novel results are more likely to be published than those that yield negative findings. Thus, on reviewing the literature, one sees the results of only a fraction of the experiments that have actually been performed and may be persuaded that a finding is more robust than it actually is.
Ed Yong examines how this issue is particularly relevant to psychology in a recent Nature news feature. He argues that because psychology research is often of interest to the public, findings that are unusual or counterintuitive tend to be widely publicized and discussed. This attitude rubs off on journal editors and reviewers too, pushing to publish only novel or interesting findings. A gradual evolution of ideas through thorough and meticulous experimentation might in theory be how science operates, but in practice the drive for novelty is biasing the ac