PEER-REVIEW: LET’S IMITATE THE LAWYERS!

As noted by Della Sala and Grafman in their Editorial, the traditional peer-review process has many drawbacks. In this comment, we would like to emphasize one particular problem of peer review, namely how reviewers handle findings that are incompatible with their own viewpoints. Speculating as to why it took several years before his ideas on the architecture of human memory were accepted by cognitive psychologists, Tulving (1999) noted that “(…) we scientists love to hate new ideas (…) and we routinely resist facts that do not fit into whatever comfortable framework we have managed to adopt (p. 12). ” If this is correct, it would mean that journal referees exhibit a “confirmation bias”, such that they tend to favour manuscripts describing results in line with their own theoretical position. Is there evidence for confirmation bias in scientists? Chinn and Brewer (1993) showed that when science students are confronted with findings contradicting their beliefs, they tend to discount such findings in various ways. Sometimes “anomalous ” results are simply ignored or placed in abeyance, othe