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Adversarial collaborations offer a rigorous way to resolve opposing scientific findings, inform key sociopolitical issues, and help repair trust in science.
In a personal history published in American Psychologist in 2003, economics Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman lamented the needless acrimony and counterproductivity of scientific disagreements hashed out without structure or standards.
"I am convinced that the time I spent on a few occasions in reply-rejoinder exercises would have been better spent doing something else," he wrote. "Both as a participant and as a reader, I have been appalled by the absurdly tive and nature of these exchanges, in which hardly anyone ever admits an error or acknowledges learning anything from the other. Doing angry science is a demeaning experience- have always felt diminished by the sense of losing my objectivity when in point-scoring mode."
Kahneman advocated for a better way: adversarial collaborations-structured efforts in which scientists who disagree on a theory, finding, or interpretation work together to resolve their disagreements. "My hope is Шаг. . . adversarial collaboration may eventually become standard. This is not a mere fantasy: It would be easy for journal editors to require critics of the published work of others-and the targets of such critiques-to make a good-faith effort to explore differences constructively. I believe that the establishment of such procedures would contribute to an enterprise that more closely approximates the ideal of science as a cumulative social product."
Traditionally, disagreeing scholars run independent research programs, writing papers, critiques, and rejoinders back and forth, aiming to persuade the scientific community that their side is correct. The process is often open-ended and inconclusive. We believe that adversarial collaborations, if widely adopted, could lead to more productive outcomes.
Neutral Ground
As in any effective debate, successful adversarial collaborations require setting clear ground rules. Scholars must agree on which positions to argue and on the values, criteria, and evidence by which they will judge which position "wins." They must agree that confirmation of their opponents' hypothesis casts doubt on their own and mutually publish the results. Some adversarial collaborations comprise only the sparring sides, whereas others use a neutral referee agreed upon by the adversaries or appointed by an outside body such as a journal's editorial board.
One successful example of such a...