When I was a little boy, most of my friends, myself included, went through a period of wanting to become firefighters, but none of us thought about becoming fire safety inspectors. Our dreams, I suppose, were the product of our environment. Probably there never was a fire safety inspector on the front page of the newspaper, even though it was because of the hard work he did in his region that not a single fire had erupted in 25 years. Fame and fortune were and still are the domain of the firefighter who rescued a helpless child from a burning home. It is rare, if at all, that hard-working and cautious people become heroes, in particular those who clean up other people’s messes—but it is often because of these people that any progress is made at all. One such potential hero in the field of psychology is Scott O. Lilienfeld.
In both psychological science and applied psychology, there is a big mess. Over 600 therapeutic modalities and literally thousands of theoretical constructs need people to come in and tidy up. Lilienfeld is in the front ranks of scientists prepared to take on the challenge of tidying up psychology, particularly clinical psychology. It is no exaggeration to say that he is the world’s most well-known skeptic psychologist engaged in demasking pseudoscience in our field.
Considering his broad range of interests, Scott Lilienfeld describes himself as a generalist. This is a very rare attitude in an age of hyperspecialization, but perhaps it is precisely for this reason that he could give himself over to education and the popularization of science. Fascinated by Carl Sagan, whom he had the fortune to meet in person and listen to his lectures, he spends a great deal of his energy on learning critical thinking and a scientific understanding of reality. The fruits of this work include several highly popular books. In 50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology: Shattering Widespread Misconceptions About Human Behavior, written with Steven Jay Lynn, John Ruscio, and Barry Beyerstein, Lilienfeld (2010) examines 50 common myths about psychology and provides readers with a “myth busting kit” to help learn critical thinking skills and understand sources of psychological myths, such as word of mouth, inferring causation from correlation, and misleading film and media portrayals. Translated into multiple languages, it serves as an educational guide to critical thinking about psychology.
No less famous is his work Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience written along with his colleague Sally Satel (2013). It focuses in its entirety on demasking the misleading falsehoods and simplifications of neuroscience. The authors target such practices as functional magnetic resonance imaging (or neuroimaging) to “detect” moral and spiritual centers of the brain, which they call “oversimplified neurononsense.”
Lilienfeld is an exceptionally prolific author, and his publications inevitably generate much controversy and protests among scientists and practitioners devoted to the very things he criticizes. He has taken pieces out of believers in the Rorschach Inkblot Test, he has written critically about eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR), recovered memory therapy and misconceptions in autism research, such as the MMR vaccine controversy, as well as fad treatments such as facilitated communication.
Lilienfeld founded the Scientific Review of Mental Health Practice, the only peer-reviewed journal devoted exclusively to distinguishing scientifically supported claims from scientifically unsupported claims in clinical psychology, psychiatry, social work and allied disciplines. For several years, he also served as its editor-in-chief. Unfortunately, the journal ceased operations for the simple reason of insufficient funding.
He is known to take a clear and unequivocal position in controversial public debates concerning psychology. One example was during the most recent presidential election, in which Donald J. Trump campaigned, and there was much discussion of abandoning the Goldwater Rule; since the 1970s, this rule has forbidden psychiatrists and psychologists from issuing public diagnoses of politicians and other famous people. Lilienfeld came out in favor of abandoning this rule, while at the same time admitting that in most cases such diagnoses are of far less value than direct observation of concrete behaviors engaged in by people in the public eye.
Professor Lilienfeld, you’re one of the world’s most well-known psychologists engaged in unmasking pseudoscience in the field of psychology. What led you go beyond your clinical research and engage to such a significant degree in countering myths and misconceptions in our field?
I love and value the field of clinical psychology, and when I entered graduate school in the early 1980s, I assumed—naively—that most practitioners in this field were relying heavily on science to inform their clinical practice. It was not until a decade or so later that I belatedly became convinced that this was not in fact the case, and that much of our field was underpinned by questionable science. I was surprised by the extent to which many clinicians were relying on their intuitions and clinical experience rather than on data. My graduate education at the University of Minnesota, wonderful as it was in many ways, had not adequately prepared me for this sobering realization. It was in the mid-1990s or so that I then decided to make the challenging of myths and misconceptions in psychology a major focus of my work.
Unmasking others probably doesn’t make you a lot of friends, does it? How are you and your work in exposing pseudoscience perceived by other psychologists?
I don’t know, but I suspect that the reaction is bimodal. I’ve certainly made my fair share of enemies, as you note, but I’m also made quite a few close friends along the way. I don’t mind tough criticism just so long as it remains substantive and doesn’t become personal. Being controversial comes with the territory.
What kind of criticism directed at you do you think is justified?
I try my best to take all substantive criticism seriously. I’m particularly open to the possibility that I have been prematurely dismissive of some previously unsubstantiated claims, and welcome corrective evidence to the contrary. For example, in the early 1990s, I raised questions regarding the efficacy of eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) for posttraumatic stress disorder and allied conditions, and I’ve since become persuaded that EMDR is indeed somewhat efficacious for these conditions. Still, I remain unpersuaded that it is more efficacious than standard cognitive behavioral therapy, although some recent data raise this possibility.
In listening to interviews with you, I also find myself wondering how you are able to maintain a healthy emotional distance from all of those abuses you encounter. Don’t they infuriate you, don’t they throw you off-balance? After all, so many of them cause real harm and human suffering.
I do occasionally become angry and enraged, and in those cases, I’ve learned to step back a bit, at least temporarily, as I worry that my emotions may impair my ability to evaluate assertions impartially. I’ve also learned over time to try to channel my negative emotions into constructive avenues, such as (hopefully) informed scientific criticism. Outrage can be a healthy emotion so long as you can control it. If it begins to control you, it can impede your approach to science.
Your attitude toward pseudoscience is untypical of the academic community. Many of them turn a blind eye to pseudoscience practices. Why, in your opinion, is this so?
There are surely several reasons. One is that our field doesn’t greatly value efforts to challenge pseudoscience. By and large, the reinforcements tend to go to those who publish lots of papers and obtain big grants, not to those who question popular claims. A second is that one inevitably makes a number of enemies, as you’ve already noted. Many professors are conflict-avoidant and would understandably prefer to do their own thing, without having to incur the wrath of others. Third and finally, academia is a bit of a cocoon. Many professors don’t appreciate the magnitude of pseudoscience, because they rarely encounter fervent believers or practitioners of pseudoscientific claims in their everyday interactions with colleagues and students. They need to spend more time out of the halls of the Ivory Tower.
A consequence of what we’re discussing is that the myths of psychology that you unmask include not only those that have arisen by some strange set of circumstances, or that have become received wisdom as a result of distortions by the media, or purposefully created by people trying to make them into money-spinners. There are also many that have been established by scientists who failed to remain skeptical enough. Which of those do you think are the most dangerous, and why?
The myths that I perceive as most dangerous are those that have the potential to damage lives. For example, the misconception that memory operates much like a video camera or tape recorder can lead jurors and other triers of fact to accord undue weight to confidently expressed eyewitness testimony, thereby landing innocent people in prison. It can also lead people to accord uncritical acceptance to recovered memories of child sexual abuse. As another example, the erroneous belief that the polygraph test is a largely infallible detector of lies has ruined many careers and hurt countless innocent people. Another class of myths that I see as pernicious is those that lead us to falsely appraise the key influences on our emotional well-being. For example, many people massively overestimate the extent to which their happiness is attributable to life events as opposed to their interpretation of these events. Indeed, research suggests that our long-term happiness is often surprisingly independent of what occurs to us. As a consequence, many of us spend large chunks of our lives trying to change our life circumstances, such as trying to find a better job or better place to live. Doing so can sometimes be helpful if one’s occupation or home is grossly suboptimal, but in many other cases it will be more helpful for us to find ways of viewing our present life circumstances in a more positive light.
Are we at all able to examine something like happiness and suggest people the ways to get to it? Does not it stand somewhat in contradiction with the Hume guillotine?
By Hume’s guillotine, I assume that you mean the hoary “is-ought” problem. Despite what some prominent philosophers have suggested, I remain persuaded that one can’t logically extract an ought from an is. Hence, with respect to happiness, I suspect that science may be able to shed light on how to achieve it, and it can certainly shed light on its correlates. I am much more dubious, however, that science can answer the question of when we ought to foster happiness. That’s a value-laden judgment that lies outside the realm of science. In some situations, such as being in a concentration camp or victim of terror, it would typically be maladaptive to be happy. Again, science can sometimes inform large-scale societal decisions about how best to achieve happiness; but the question of whether and when to foster happiness invariably entails complex value judgments that are a-scientific.
Some of very popular myths are created and spread within highly regarded neuroscience. With Sally Satel you devoted the whole book to describe them. Has anything changed since the publication of this book?
Since our book was published, we’ve seen something of a backlash against overstated neuroscience claims, a trend that I basically see as healthy. I say “basically” because at times this backlash has itself become overstated, with some authors going so far as to decry most or all neuroimaging findings as akin to phrenology or other pseudosciences—an assertion I forcefully reject. At least among my colleagues in clinical psychology, I’m beginning to see a somewhat more thoughtful and scientifically balanced perspective on neuroscience claims, with a recognition that neuroscience can provide one extremely helpful lens of analysis on human behavior without displacing other lenses. I suspect that some of this recognition has come from the realization that many of the most expansive promises of neuroscience haven’t been borne out. When I was in graduate school in the 1980s, many prominent leaders in the field were confidently predicting that neuroimaging would supplant—not merely supplement—psychiatric diagnostic tools. They assured us that within a matter of a decade or so, brain scans would replace psychiatric interviews and questionnaires as a means of diagnosing schizophrenia, depression and other serious mental disorders. Needless to say, that hasn’t happened; when DSM-5 was published in 2013, it contained not a single neural marker among its many hundreds of diagnostic criteria. We’ve seen a similar pattern of hype, followed by disappointment and disillusionment, in a number of neuroscience domains over the past few decades. As a consequence, many psychologists have rightly become more skeptical.
Among skeptics you are also known as a person who writes and speaks about the need for better communication between scientists, skeptics and the general public. In your opinion, what is the key to the minds possessed by totally wrong pseudoscientific ideas?
The key is recognizing that it’s not an “us versus them” proposition. We are all prone to fallacious thinking, myself included, and scientific thinking doesn’t come naturally or easily to any of us. So it’s critical to display respect to individuals who hold questionable beliefs, as we’ve all been there ourselves. I’ve sometimes been surprised, even taken aback, at the extent to some of my fellow skeptics exhibit blatant disdain or contempt toward individuals who sincerely hold dubious beliefs (I’m not talking here about outright charlatans who know full well that they disseminating nonsense, as I have no patience for them). Again, the key is to communicate respect and intellectual humility. We scientists typically aren’t very good at this, and we are rarely trained in it either. I have no doubt that I have failed repeatedly in this regard, although I hope that I am getting a bit better with each passing year.
The clearly pseudoscientific practices we are discussing are one thing, and some scientific practices that are leading our field over a cliff into something that can no longer be called science are something totally different. Recently, the problems caused by such practices have been growing in intensity. What I have in mind is fraudulent research, methodological carelessness resulting in studies that are essentially non-replicable, the lack of access to raw data and other phenomena that are detailed in the book Psychological Science Under Scrutiny, which you edited. Taking all of this into consideration, would you feel it is fair to say that psychology is presently experiencing a crisis?
Yes, although I don’t see the crisis as limited to psychology. I see it as a far broader challenge confronting science at large. We are witnessing similar problems of replicability in a number of other domains, such as economics, medicine (including psychiatry) and cancer treatment, among others. I suspect that psychology is in the crosshairs of public opinion largely because we’ve been the field that has taken the hardest look at itself. I actually see these as encouraging days for psychology, and I concur with those who contend that we undergoing a renaissance at least as much as a crisis. We are operating the way a healthy science operates; we are identifying errors in our standard ways of doing business and doing our best to root them out and correct them. We have a long way to go, but at least we are on the road to salvation.
I’ve invoked the subject of crisis on purpose, because I am under the impression—and not for the first time—that scientists confronted with improprieties in their research field are merely acting as though they are extremely surprised. After all, Jacob Cohen (1962) has been writing and speaking about the problems resulting from null hypothesis significance testing since the beginning of the 1960s. At that same time, Leroy Wolins (1962) initiated a discussion about access to raw data. Other problems have been under discussion for decades now, but action is only taken when the media take an interest. Why is this the case when the majority of them result from insufficient scientific skepticism, which is the essence of doing science?
I suspect that reinforcement contingencies provide much of the answer. In the words of Upton Sinclair, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” In the case of academic psychology, we are rewarded primarily for publishing lots of papers in high-profile journals and securing large federal grants. There are few or no incentives for us to engage in soul-searching regarding our cherished methodological assumptions. In fact, there are often active disincentives, because collecting larger samples, conducting multiple studies, avoiding p-hacking techniques, tempering one’s claims, and the like, are often implicitly discouraged. (I recently received a review of a manuscript in which the reviewer criticized us for spending too much time acknowledging potential weaknesses in our theoretical position.) Investigators who make concerted efforts to engage in such safeguards often find it harder to get job offers, and to receive tenure and promotion after they are hired. Fortunately, this state of affairs is gradually changing in many quarters.
Which of the issues addressed in Psychological Science Under Scrutiny do you think are the most serious, and why do you think so?
Self-delusion, including confirmation bias. I suspect that most researchers are fundamentally honest. But I also suspect that many or most of them are largely unaware of the extent to which their theoretical allegiances and hypotheses can deceive them, leading them to engage in methodological practices, such as p-hacking and HARKING (hypothesizing after results are known), which can in turn lead them to spuriously corroborate their beliefs. Adding to this problem is what Emily Pronin and colleagues (2002) term “bias blind spot,” which afflicts scientists just as much as the rest of us. Most of us assume that others are biased, but that we aren’t. As a consequence, many scientists may assume that they are largely free of confirmation bias and don’t need to be concerned about its adverse impact on their analyses and interpretation of data.
What should we do to solve these problems?
The open science movement is a great start. Preregistration of one’s hypotheses and analyses, especially when done rigorously, is an essential safeguard against not only fraud, but self-deception. Obviously, greater transparency, including providing open data whenever practically and ethically feasible, is also enormously helpful, as it allows well-intentioned scientists to double-check their colleagues’ work and conclusions.
Do you think that open science movement and campaigns like the Reproducibility Project and other similar initiatives are sufficient?
They aren’t sufficient, but they are and excellent start, and Brian Nosek of the University of Virginia and many others should be applauded for their courageous efforts. Still, we are going to need a large-scale change in academic culture. Department chairs and administrators are going to need to find ways of better rewarding high-quality, dependable science rather than grant dollars. Many of them don’t seem to realize that the relentless pursuit of the grant dollar is a virtual recipe for confirmation bias and attendant questionable research practices, such as selective reporting of findings. It’s hard to get one’s grant renewed if one comes up empty-handed in terms of one’s initial findings.
Exactly two months before our conversation, Many Labs Two results have been published. Half of the 28 influential psychological researches were replicated successfully. Is it much or few? Is the glass half full or half empty?
It’s hard to say, but I don’t think that a 50% replication rate is all that encouraging. We can certainly do much better, and we are beginning to see that in some domains of psychology, including personality psychology, the replication rates appear to be considerably higher. That said, we should be reluctant to conclude that this result means that only 50% of the original findings are genuine. Some of the replication failures may reflect subtle, undetected moderators, although of course to the extent that the moderators are subtle, it may well call the robustness and generality of the findings into question.
There is one more problem plaguing contemporary psychology, and which is not addressed in Psychological Science Under Scrutiny. I mean the shift from direct observation of behavior, widely regarded as an advance in the development of scientific methodology, to introspection. This was demonstrated in an outstanding 2007 article by Baumeister and his collaborators, and recently confirmed by Doliński (2018), who replicated Baumeister’s investigations. Both articles show that over the last few decades, studies of behavior have become a rarity among psychologists. This issue is brought into sharper relief by the fact that the first of the two articles was published in the middle of the decade that the APA announced with great pomp as the decade of behavior. What are your thoughts on this issue?
I am torn. I’m certainly sympathetic to the assertion that we don’t spend nearly enough time observing and analyzing actual behavior, and I’m guilty of this trend too. But things are probably more complicated than many authors imply. For one thing, studying actual behavior is awfully hard. It takes a lot of time and effort, which is certainly one reason why we don’t do it enough. But for another, studying actual behavior often contributes to largely unappreciated difficulties with replicability. We learned, or should have learned—from debates in the 1960s and 1970s involving Walter Mischel, Jack Block, Seymour Epstein and others—that studies based on isolated (unaggregated) behaviors are frequently erratic and unreplicable. If we are going to return to studying actual behavior, which I very much support, we are going to need to do it well. Ironically, the replication rates in personality psychology, which relies largely on self-reports, appear to be considerably higher than in much of social psychology, in which we often study behavior. That’s perhaps in part because self-reports, as fallible as they are, at least aggregate behavior across multiple imperfect indicators, thereby minimizing errors of measurement. Until recently, many social psychologists did not adequately appreciate the hazards of excessive or exclusive reliance on unaggregated single behavioral indices, such as the speed with which one walks down a hallway after being primed with words connoting old age. I don’t share the view that we should be diminishing the value of self-reports of personality traits and other dispositions. Ample data show that these measures yield robust relations with important life indices, including work performance, longevity, happiness, risk for mental illness and the like.
How is it that in spite of information appearing about the crisis and the general decline in trust toward psychology the subject seems to be attracting ever greater numbers of people? As a major, it is shattering records among students in both Europe and America. Isn’t this in some way reminiscent of practitioners of a religion who don’t pay heed to objective information they are receiving?
I don’t see it this way. I see much of this popular interest as reflecting a recognition that psychology continues to address crucial issues that affect people’s lives, such as biases, finance, romance, friendships, work, memory, learning, healthy and unhealthy emotions, sleep, eating and the like. Psychology has interesting and important things to say about all of these topics.
Some people claim that psychology attracts people who like fuzzy disciplines, where there are no precise claims and hard knowledge, there is a lot of room for interpretation and no responsibility is required. What is your opinion about it?
There’s perhaps some truth to this perspective, although I suspect that it’s a bit more complicated than that. Instead, I suspect that psychology tends to attract people who are interested in complex conceptual issues relevant to human nature, and it so happens that many of these issues are often murky and difficult to investigate. Still, I think that there is far too much tolerance for unclear thinking in psychology. Psychiatrist Samuel Guze once made the point that in domains in which we dealing with fuzzy concepts, such as psychiatric diagnosis, we often tend to tolerate equally fuzzy thinking. As he observed, it’s precisely in these domains that we instead need to be exceptionally rigorous in our thinking.
In talking about psychiatric diagnosis, we have entered a field that is your original area of expertise. Taking a broad look at psychology as a science and at its applied sub-disciplines, I get the impression that clinical psychology and psychotherapy in particular are not a direct product of the application of scientific discoveries in clinical practice. I also get the impression that these two fields have developed independently of each other, which naturally has serious consequences for practice. What is your opinion on this subject?
It depends. Much of behavior therapy drew directly upon basic animal, and later human, laboratory findings on learning processes. Over time, though, I agree that these two fields have become increasingly disconnected, and that few of the innovations in psychotherapy derive from well-replicated discoveries in basic psychological science. Fortunately, there are some notable exceptions; Michelle Craske et al.’s (2014) recent work on applying basic clinical science research on inhibitory learning to the treatment of anxiety disorders comes to mind as an exemplary example.
Which of the issues in clinical psychology and psychotherapy do you consider particularly dangerous, and why?
Perhaps the biggest threat I see is a resistance to science on the part of a subset of individuals in clinical psychology. Despite the writings of Meehl, Kahneman, Dawes, Faust, Garb and others, some practitioners continue to believe that they can rely largely on their clinical intuitions and clinical experience to inform their choice of assessment instruments and clinical interventions. Needless to say, the histories of medicine, including psychiatry, and psychology tell us otherwise, and warn us of the hazards of this kind of epistemic hubris. In my view, all practitioners should be well aware of the history of disastrous errors in clinical practice, such as Henry Cotton’s practices of removal of surgical organs to treat psychosis, prefrontal lobotomy, insulin coma therapy, recovered memory therapy, facilitated communication for autism spectrum disorder and so on. All of these interventions and many more were widely assumed to be effective, even though they actually caused untold harm. As a field, we need to do a better job of (a) selecting students who are scientifically minded and (b) training them in core principles of scientific thinking, which entail the use of systematic safeguards against biases to which we are all prone.
We can judge the power of science by the questions it poses and the answers it provides to them. What big questions have psychology found an answer to so far?
Far fewer than we might like. But in my lifetime, I’d list among the most important discoveries as the following: (a) the realization that genetic factors contribute to virtually all individual differences relevant to human behavior, (b) the realization that the most important environmental factors that contribute to human behavior are nonshared within families, not shared, as presumed by many major models of personality development (e.g., psychoanalytic and social learning models), (c) the realization that essentially all mental disorders are exceedingly multiply determined, and that any model that posits a single gene or specific environmental etiology is likely to be wildly oversimplified, and (d) the realization that although we humans are basically rational, our thinking processes can be distorted by a host of biases of which are largely unaware.
Which big problems still remain mysterious?
More than I can count. But the hard problem of consciousness—how we experience our subjective worlds—remains utterly mysterious, at least to me. Also, we remain a long way from understanding how genes and environment combine or interact to produce human diversity. Even when it comes to genes, a multiplicity of puzzling questions remain. We know that most human individual differences, such as personality and general intelligence, are moderately to highly heritable, and yet we’ve made only painfully slow progress in identifying specific genes for these phenotypes. Why? It seems likely that they are far more heterogeneous than most of us had assumed. If so, we really have our work cut out for us in identifying their causes.
Will the rapid development of AI help us in finding answers to these questions?
I suspect it will help a bit, but I doubt that it will be anything close to a panacea. Combining extant data in more sophisticated ways, as in machine learning, is indeed helpful. But ultimately, we are going to need more powerful theories.
Would you say that psychologists are not enthusiastic about using self-learning algorithms in their work?
I’ve actually seen quite a bit of enthusiasm, at least among psychologists who are methodologically sophisticated. If anything, I worry a bit that they are being prematurely overhyped.
Our conversation will also probably be read by young people just getting their careers started, and who are wondering what specialization to explore. What areas of investigation in psychology do you think are particularly promising and would recommend?
I’m reluctant to hazard a guess about which domains of psychology will prove to be especially promising. But were I entering this field again as a young scholar, I’d probably be most interested in the question of the sources of human irrationality. I agree with psychologists Keith Stanovich (2009) and Robert Sternberg (2008) that we’ve put far too much emphasis on general/analytic intelligence—important as it is—and not nearly enough on such dispositions as scientific thinking, wisdom and intellectual humility, all of which may buffer against pseudoscientific and otherwise irrational beliefs (incidentally, I do not share the view of some psychologists that most or all identified human “biases” are merely artifacts of clever laboratory experiments dreamed up by psychologists—these psychologists need to get out more, and to watch more news and read more world history). I’d also encourage them to explore debiasing approaches—how we can either minimize biases or at least temper their impact.
Who would you point them to as an example to follow?
Daniel Kahneman. Paul Meehl. Carl Sagan. Many others.
What should they be careful of? Can you give them any other advice?
My major piece of advice is to not get too drawn in by intellectual fads. What is “hot” today is likely to be “cold” tomorrow. My other piece of advice is to learn the history of the field. Doing so can be a potent prescription for intellectual humility, as it can remind one of how many smart and highly confident people went very badly wrong.
Let’s finish by abandoning our skepticism and intellectual cautiousness and giving our imagination free reign. I’d like to hear about your vision of our field of science for the next two or three decades. I am particularly interested in your response to the question of whether psychology will remain a science that generates a great deal of sexy results that nevertheless do not contribute to forming some general theory, or will it also do the heavy lifting of integrating what we do know, if not into a general theory of human behavior, then at least into theories of slightly greater scope than those presently existing?
I’ve learned over the years to be reluctant to prognosticate, largely because I’ve usually been incorrect in my forecasts. But I do hope and suspect that in the coming decades, we will begin to see greater theoretical synthesis and integration in at least some domains. For example, in the domain of psychopathology, we are gradually beginning to see the rudiments of a coherent theoretical model of mental illness rooted in a relatively small number of biologically influenced personality dispositions that interact with developmental and environmental factors. At the very least, we are also beginning to see the emergence of a recognition that our long-standing models of psychiatric classification, most of which have been premised on the neo-Kraepelinian view of discrete disorders generated by a specific etiology, are likely to be insufficient for many or most psychological conditions.
I have surprise question for you if you agree.
Sure.
I have a list of 30 questions that my readers would like to ask the most influential psychologists in the world. Please draw one.
I’ll pick my lucky number 23.
If you had a power to establish one rule for all scientists. What would be this rule?
Preregister your hypotheses and analysis plans, and be clear up front about which of your analyses are planned (confirmatory) and which are unplanned (exploratory). It’s the best antidote available against confirmation bias and intellectual hubris, and it can be a humbling experience as an investigator.