Advice to young behavioral and cognitive scientists

Abstract

Modeled on Medawar's Advice to a Young Scientist [Medawar, P.B., 1979. Advice to a Young Scientist. Basic Books, New York], this article provides advice to behavioral and cognitive scientists. An important guiding principle is that the study of comparative cognition and behavior are natural sciences tasked with explaining nature. The author advises young scientists to begin with a natural phenomenon and then bring it into the laboratory, rather than beginning in the laboratory and hoping for an application in nature. He suggests collaboration as a way to include research outside the scientist's normal competence. He then discusses several guides to good science. These guides include Tinbergen's [Tinbergen, N., 1963. On aims and methods of ethology. Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie, 20, 410-433. This journal was renamed Ethology in 1986. Also reprinted in Anim. Biol. 55, 297-321, 2005] four "why" questions, Platt's [Platt, J.R., 1964. Strong inference. Science 146, 347-353, (http://weber.ucsd.edu/~jmoore/courses/Platt1964.pdf)] notion of strong inference using multiple alternative hypotheses, and the idea that positive controls help scientists to follow Popper's [Popper, K.R., 1959. The Logic of Scientific Discovery. Basic Books, New York, p. 41] advice about disproving hypotheses. The author also recommends Strunk and White's [Strunk, W., White, E.B., 1979. The Elements of Style, third ed. Macmillan, New York] rules for sound writing, and he provides his personal advice on how to use the anticipation of peer review to improve research and how to decode editors' and reviewers' comments about submitted articles.