Post date: Jul 13, 2013 8:15:08 AM
An opinion piece based on this blog was published in the Dutch newspaper NRC on 25-7-2013
Admitting you have a problem is the first step to healing. So here it goes: I have an addiction. To be more specific, I’m addicted to gambling. I know it is completely irrational, but I can’t stop doing it.
I could fool myself for a long time. I’d look around, compare myself to others, and think: There’s nothing wrong with me. I started to get worried about my behavior when I saw how it affected my close relationships. My wife could tell something was not right. Every time I told her I was trying to complete a really difficult level in Candy Crush, I was actually working on the knowledge utilization paragraph. Getting the reference list done. Photo-shopping the figure showing how all the sub-projects linked together. Writing ‘synergy’, ‘paradigm shift’, and ‘milestone’.
My name is Daniel Lakens, and I’m addicted to writing grant proposals. Sure, I know how the saying goes. Grant proposals are a productivity tax on people who are bad in math. But recently, I got my first small 25k grant proposal accepted. It might just about cover all the hours I spent writing grant proposals the last four years. But like a person behind a slot machine, my winnings are going back into the system. I can feel I’m really close to landing the big one. I can just feel it.
It’s past time for an intervention. We should stop gambling on grant proposals. Collectively, more time and money is wasted in writing grant proposals than is returned to the scientific community in the form of scientific funding (Because the original article in Nature is behind a pay-wall, read this blog post instead). That means if we all stop writing grant proposals, science will benefit. That’s right, even if we leave the grant money reserved for research untouched. Sure, it’s a good idea if some research that has potential gets a little extra money. Not too much, because it’s better for scientific impact to give a lot of people a little extra funding, than some people a lot of extra funding. And although it is impossible to hand out money completely objectively on the basis of future potential (there will always be some politics), it would be better to let universities make this decision.
There is a lot of randomness in the decision in which grants should be funded. I think no scientist in their right mind would use a measurement system that is so inaccurate to do science, yet we passively accept the fact that such a system determines which science should be done.
Getting grant money is now a requirement if you want to get a tenured job in academia. We know external reward reduces internal motivation. Trying to motivate yourself by focusing on external rewards is pretty much a guaranteed midlife crisis when you work in science. You know, those researchers who after getting their work published in Science say: “What now”?
We also know that cooperation, compared to competition, improves the performance of groups. See for example the description of the work by Deutsch (1949) in the classic book The Social Psychology of Groups by Thibaut and Kelly on page 258. As they write:
Compared with the competitive groups, the cooperative ones showed greater division of labor but greater coordination of their efforts, more effective intermember communication with greater acceptance of each other's ideas and fewer difficulties in understanding each other, and greater intermember friendliness and desire to win one another's respect. Perhaps most significant is the fact that the cooperatively organized groups were more productive.
Personally, I would say forget about the higher productivity – I’d be happy if we just see an improvement in science in friendliness and respect. Apparently, as the story goes, there was a time in science where Professors were mainly interested in keeping their stamp collection organized during working hours, and only produced knowledge when they really didn’t know what else to do. This was somewhere around the time you could make a disco cover of any song and make a video clip like this. I think we can all agree: The times have changed. I was recently talking to some people with too large offices in the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research, and they are True Believers when it comes to stimulating competition in science. Of course, the only way they can influence scientists is by making them compete for research grants, and for a hammer, every problem is a nail.
The reward structures in academia interest me to no end. The amount of irrationality in a system built on rationality is baffling. I understand it’s hard to break the habit. Intermittent reinforcement is resistant to extinction. Getting a grant only now and then is a sure way to get you to keep trying. And if your job depends on getting grants, I’m not suggesting you throw in the grant proposal towel immediately. But we are all reasonably smart people. We should all be able to understand the empirical data. Our system of distributing research money is bankrupt. We have been wasting resources, undermining our intrinsic motivation, and polluting the interpersonal relationships with our colleagues across the world. The question is not whether the way we distribute research funding should change: The question is whether we are going to change it.