Why can't people simply publish negative results?
> Break the link between publication and grant funding.
Same answer - in fact give extra priority to those who publish lots of negative results.
Mainly because it's not as interesting. For every positive result researchers find there are dozens of things they test that just don't work.
Imagine if the first test of "romantic priming" didn't work. Would the researchers really bother trying to publish "Hypothesised romantic priming effect was just a wild hunch after all."? And would the journal accept it? No way.
Of course if you get a negative effect for an established "fact", as in this case it can be published. But you have to be really really sure otherwise the reviewers will just say you did your experiment wrong.
That seems to be the core of the problem. Reality doesn't have a bias toward results that are interesting, humans do.
> Imagine if the first test of "romantic priming" didn't work. Would the researchers really bother trying to publish "Hypothesised romantic priming effect was just a wild hunch after all."? And would the journal accept it? No way.
So maybe they should.
The journal's peer review process tends to reject them. Or so I'm told by a researcher friend of mine.
In addition to the other comments: because a negative result is usually much more likely than a negative one, it is very hard to be sure that the experimenter did not simply screw up the experiment.
A lack of positive proof generally does not constitute a negative proof.