Teams of Rivals
By Stephen J. Ceci, Cory J. Clark, Lee Jussim, Wendy M. Williams
Adversarial collaborations offer a rigorous way to resolve opposing scientific findings, inform key sociopolitical issues, and help repair trust in science.
This Article From Issue
November-December 2025
Volume 113, Number 6
Page 336
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.
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- Contradictory findings persist in social sciences, undermining validity, reliability, and public trust in research. Practices such as open science cannot fully address this problem.
- Entrenched positions result from a system that rewards novelty, supports fiefdoms, and disincentivizes publishing null results and reproducibility studies.
- Adversarial collaborations offer a neutral framework for resolving disputes and mutually publishing findings, but they require wider adoption to be effective.
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