Stephen Jay Gould referred to science as ‘a profession that awards status and power for clean and unambiguous discovery’ [my italics]. The social psychologist Roger Giner-Sorolla concurs: ‘In a head-to-head competition between papers … the paper with results that are all significant and consistent will be preferred over the equally well-conducted paper that reports the outcome, warts and all, to reach a more qualified conclusion.’74 Here we see how publication bias and p-hacking are two manifestations of the same phenomenon: a desire to erase results that don’t fit well with a preconceived
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