ArticleManagement science2022
Conservatism Gets Funded? A Field Experiment on the Role of Negative Information in Novel Project Evaluation.
Article in Management science, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed, 49 citations in OpenAlex.
- Tenure and research trajectories.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Promotional language and the adoption of innovative ideas in science.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Does familiarity with an idea bias its evaluation?PloS one · 2023Article
- Is novel research worth doing? Evidence from peer review at 49 journals.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
The evaluation and selection of novel projects lies at the heart of scientific and technological innovation, and yet there are persistent concerns about bias, such as conservatism. This paper investigates the role that the format of evaluation, specifically information sharing among expert evaluators, plays in generating conservative decisions. We executed two field experiments in two separate grant-funding opportunities at a leading research university, mobilizing 369 evaluators from seven universities to evaluate 97 projects, resulting in 761 proposal-evaluation pairs and more than $250,000 in awards. We exogenously varied the relative valence (positive and negative) of others' scores and measured how exposures to higher and lower scores affect the focal evaluator's propensity to change their initial score. We found causal evidence of a negativity bias, where evaluators
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.