How Do Scientific Views Change? Notes From an Extended Adversarial Collaboration
PSPE
- Cowan, Nelson ORCID Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Missouri
- Belletier, Clément Laboratoire de Psychologie Sociale et Cognitive (LAPSCO), Université Clermont Auvergne, CNRS
- Doherty, Jason M. Department of Psychology, University of Edinburgh
- Jaroslawska, Agnieszka J. School of Psychology, Queen’s University Belfast
- Rhodes, Stephen Rotman Research Institute, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
- Forsberg, Alicia Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Missouri
- Naveh-Benjamin, Moshe Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Missouri
- Barrouillet, Pierre Faculté de Psychologie et des Sciences de l’Éducation, Université de Genève
- Camos, Valérie ORCID Département de Psychologie, Université de Fribourg, Suisse
- Logie, Robert H. Department of Psychology, University of Edinburgh
- 2020
Published in:
- Perspectives on Psychological Science. - SAGE Publications. - 2020, vol. 15, no. 4, p. 1011-1025
English
There are few examples of an extended adversarial collaboration, in which investigators committed to different theoretical views collaborate to test opposing predictions. Whereas previous adversarial collaborations have produced single research articles, here, we share our experience in programmatic, extended adversarial collaboration involving three laboratories in different countries with different theoretical views regarding working memory, the limited information retained in mind, serving ongoing thought and action. We have focused on short-term memory retention of items (letters) during a distracting task (arithmetic), and effects of aging on these tasks. Over several years, we have conducted and published joint research with preregistered predictions, methods, and analysis plans, with replication of each study across two laboratories concurrently. We argue that, although an adversarial collaboration will not usually induce senior researchers to abandon favored theoretical views and adopt opposing views, it will necessitate varieties of their views that are more similar to one another, in that they must account for a growing, common corpus of evidence. This approach promotes understanding of others’ views and presents to the field research findings accepted as valid by researchers with opposing interpretations. We illustrate this process with our own research experiences and make recommendations applicable to diverse scientific areas.
- Faculty
- Faculté des lettres et des sciences humaines
- Department
- Département de Psychologie
- Language
-
- English
- Classification
- Psychology
- License
-
Rights reserved
- Open access status
- green
- Identifiers
-
- DOI 10.1177/1745691620906415
- ISSN 1745-6916
- Persistent URL
- https://folia.unifr.ch/unifr/documents/334843
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