Skinner used the term “schedules of reinforcement” to describe broad categories of reward patterns which come to reliably control the behavior of his experimental animals. For instance, when he rewarded rats for pressing a lever at a given interval after the last reinforcement (i.e., fixed interval; FI), the animals would pause pressing the lever until just before the interval was over and then start pressing the lever like mad. When the number of presses are plotted cumulatively over time, this leads to a scalloped plot (black trace in Fig. 1). A similar, but clearly distinct curve can be observed when the reward comes only after a given number of lever presses (i.e., fixed ratio; FR): there, the animals stop pressing while they consume the reward and then resume repeatedly pressing the lever until the next reward is consumed (blue trace in Fig. 1). If the ratio or interval is varied, however, the animals more or less consistently press the lever at a rate given by the reward frequency (red and green traces, Fig. 1).
Fig. 1.: Different categories of response patterns to different schedules of reinforcement. VR – variable ratio; FR – fixed ratio; VI – variable interval; FI – fixed interval
In an analogous way, if you tell scientists that they need a certain number of publications to get/keep their jobs, they will double the number of articles they publish. Likewise, if you tell scientists that they need to “acquire external funding” in order to get/keep their jobs, they will increase the number of grants they write, until it’s almost all they do. This latter response class is particularly absurd and counterproductive: the number of scientists keeps increasing, at least for now. In most countries, the increase is larger than the increase in public funds, or the public funds are even decreasing. This means that the success rate of getting research funding must drop, even if every researcher would not increase the number of grants they write. However, as each scientist needs grants to keep working, the dropping success rates have the same consequence as a VR schedule with a low probability of reward (red line, Fig. 1): scientists maintain a very high level of grant writing which matches the decreasing success rate: if it’s 10%, you have to – on average – write 10 grant proposals to get one of them funded. If the success rate is down to 5%, you have to write 20 and so on. As scientists multiply and keep increasing the number of grants they write, the success rates keep dropping accordingly, making the scientists write yet more proposals. A vicious cycle if ever there was one. Skinner couldn’t have devised a more pernicious schedule himself.
That may seem absurd enough, but it is only half of the story. As research “income is crucial to the development of world-class research“, not only universities are ranked according to the volume of government funds they attract, but also (and likely consequently) the scientists within each institution are ranked according to the funds they attract. In Germany, for example, how much funds a scientist can attract, can have direct effects on their salary. Thus, if there is a cheaper and a more expensive way to do the same experiment, it is in the scientist’s own best interest to chose the more expensive experiment. As it stands today, scientists should write as many grant proposals as possible and make them as expensive as possible. In other words: the successful scientist of today wastes not only time, but also tax funds. If you factor in that in order to get your grants funded, you also must publish in the so-called ‘top-journals’ where the key factor is getting past the professional editor, the most successful scientists of this day must be great salespersons: they need to sell grant agencies their wasteful research proposals and editors their unreliable papers. If we are lucky, some of them might also be great scientists, as well.
I’m feeling the ratio strain. It sounds like a progressive ratio rather than a variable ratio schedule to me.
Of course, you are correct – I just didn’t have a graph for that schedule handy 🙂
This analysis is downright silly, but then so is a lot of behavioral analysis. It ignores a lot of other forces. For example, that cheaper grants are more likely to get funded. And of course the concept of accurate human judgement, in funding and publishing, is ignored altogether. For example, increasing the number of grant applications need not increase the chances of getting funded, quite the opposite.
I’m not so sure cheaper grants are generally more likely to get funded – any evidence to support this claim? For instance, if I can do an experiment with a technique that’s considered out-of-date, or with a brand new machine that uses modern technology to look at the same thing (and, of course, potentially also at other things the old technique cannot), the more expensive grant is much more likely to get funded, if only for the ‘potential’ to do more with the machine at a later stage (which may or may not happen).
And you are of the opinion that writing more grants doesn’t increase your chances of getting funded? Wow, you should quickly tell this to all of my colleagues (and those at Harvard in the report I linked to) who are doubling and tripling their grant applications that they are all doing it the wrong way! lol
I wonder: if all I had to do before was to write a proposal at the NIH to get funded, but now the odds are so low, why would sending proposals also to the NSF, HFSP or the ERC etc. decrease my chances of getting funded? That’s downright absurd! I’m sure all the faculty at Harvard featured in the article will be very interested in that answer!
My basic point is that if you seriously want to model this situation the simple model you are proposing is a joke. (It is also interesting that the rats found the winning strategies. In addition to studying the system of science I also blog on animal cognition. https://horsecognition.blogspot.com/)
For example, if you send a lot of different proposals to the same program you will likely be seen as a flake. Sending the same proposal to multiple sources must often be disclosed and is frowned upon. Even when it is not disclosed the overlap of peer reviewers may well reveal it. And if you inform your university or laboratory the large number of failures may count against you. There is more to it than this as well.
The programs I am familiar with all consider cost as an important decision factor. How can they not, given the severe budget constraints?
Science is a complex system, especially compared to rats in a cage (which is already fairly complex). A decision model for scientists will not be simple.
I’m not sure what you’re trying to say. That decreasing grant success rate has nothing to do with the increase in grant writing? That all the thousands of scientists writing their hands bloody just trying to get by, in reality just don’t have anything better to do with their time than writing grants?
I like the point that scientists behave just like those salespersons. They have to promote themselves. Yet in today’s world, this kind of behavior is inevitable for the scientists, considering the fact that there are so many people doing scientific researches. Perhaps we should really think scientist more or less as a job, a career. For the comparison between the experiments on rats and great number of proposals of scientists, I think, it is a bit improper, as David Wojick said. I don’t have many evidences either for ‘against’ or for ‘pro’, it is just a personal opinion.