Should Your Beaker be Half-Empty or Half-Full?
by
At some point in our careers we have likely worked with a King Midas- a person for whom experiments just always seem to work. They tend to have an outlook that experiments should work and they seem genuinely shocked when they fail. We’ve probably also worked with a colleague who assumes the natural state of the universe is failure, and thus sees an unsuccessful experiment as par for the course. But is one a better scientist than the other?
Our job as research scientists is to develop and test hypotheses through experimentation. How we pursue our goals can be largely affected by who we are as individuals. Some of us prefer to elucidate every detail of a mechanism to fully understand the process. Others gravitate toward the big-picture ideas and are bored by what they see as minutiae.
Yet, beyond our inherent personality differences, can our general state of mind affect our experiments? Are pessimists better at identifying the reasons an experiment might fail, and thus better at setting up complete experiments than optimists? Are optimists more likely to try the high-risk experiment that might change the world, but only has a 1% chance of working?
Maybe – but does this translate into a better scientist? If so, can we adapt our outlook accordingly?
.
Loading ....
.
Colin
wrote on February 22, 2010 at 8:20 pm
Question all results: more suited for a pessimist.
Ideally it shouldn't matter what you *believe*, only what results you *get*. A pessimist is less likely to believe their results are correct when they are not.
Aida
wrote on February 22, 2010 at 8:58 pm
Hi Colin,
I don't agree with that. You can be optimistic and objective, not necessarily delusional : )
Tim Maguire
wrote on February 23, 2010 at 1:52 am
The real question is, is your reaction exothermic or endothermic in your half full/empty beaker.
Lab Rat
wrote on February 26, 2010 at 8:39 am
Has to be optimism. I think I'd just give up if I was pessimistic; need the optimism to keep you going after something's failed for the sixth-hundred time.
alan@benchfly
wrote on February 26, 2010 at 2:45 pm
The average experimental success rate can challenge the will of even the purest of optimists. Perhaps Jim Carrey's character in Dumb&Dumber would have been a great scientist- in the scene where he asks Lauren Holly's character, "what are the chances of a girl like me ending up with a guy like you?" and she says "one in a million." He looks upset then pauses and gets really excited and says "So you're saying there's a chance!"…
What are the odds of this ligation working?…. So you're saying there's a chance…
Chuck
wrote on October 8, 2011 at 12:56 am
Emotion should not influence the process of scientific investigation. The answer to "which state of mind makes the best scientist" is a CRITICAL state of mind. Being critical is independent of having an optimistic or pessimistic prediction of your results prior to the experiment.