Mary Childs

You know, to actually discover true new knowledge about human behavior.

He thought, This is so stupid.

What am I doing?

I'm writing a piece saying that smoking bans are decreasing smoking prevalence because I managed to find one that worked.

I was like, this is dumb.

I'm doing something wrong.

Abel ultimately decided not to use his tortured results.

He wrote up his paper showing that he'd found no effect, even if it meant his paper was less exciting.

And at first, he thought what he'd done to his data might have just been a one-off mistake on his part.

But then you start talking to other students and people were like, oh, yeah.

That's how you publish.

Abel started to see that this was a problem of incentives.

In order to advance their careers, academics have to publish papers in peer-reviewed journals.

And the journals want to publish work that's statistically significant and novel.

These papers can win big prizes and define new research agendas for decades.

Because the project took like three, four years of back and forth between co-authors, discussion.

Then six months later, you go back, you exclude again these other people, you do something different.

And then over time, all these decisions, actually, when you look at it from the outside, it's like, this is crazy what you've done.

To figure out how widespread this problem might be, Abel decided to research the research.

He and a couple of his colleagues scraped the significance data from a bunch of the top academic journals, the distribution of stars that published researchers had racked up.