Communicate Objectively

Be neutral in reporting your results so that the reader is not led to believe that you performed your experiments with an expected outcome in mind. Think about instances when you would use the phrases in the table on the right.

Instead of … Use…
We could not find We did not find
We failed to find
We failed to identify
Table 1: Phrases which suggest a bias should be avoided.

Inappropriate use of Subjectively Seeking a Result

We could not find an effect, even after three hours of exposure.

We did not find an effect, even after three hours of exposure.

No effects were observed, even after three hours of exposure.

There are two instances when you will have an expected outcome:

  1. It’s clear you, or someone else, is trying to reproduce a specific result (under the same or different conditions), as per the example below, or,
  2. You’re reporting statistical results, as in we failed to reject the null hypothesis, see page

Appropriate use of Subjectively Seeking a Result

Although studies using live models can elicit contagious yawns in dogs (22), Harr et al. (23) failed to find such an effect using video clips.