Prediction-error tolerance: Error attribution as the hinge between inquiry and the self
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Close to one in three early-career researchers reports elevated psychological distress, at rates varying little across disciplines, genders and career stages. The standard explanation attributes the burden to the conditions of academic work; its rival prescribes resilience. Neither says what a condition does to a researcher who cannot yet tell whether an unexpected result reflects the phenomenon, the instrument or her own competence. A prediction error has no address until a researcher gives it one: by the Duhem–Quine thesis it may belong to the object of inquiry, the method or the context of evaluation, and logic does not decide which. We define prediction-error tolerance as the capacity to keep treating discrepancies as operable questions while holding uncertainty open, and identify its core operation, error-attribution separation, as the point at which two costs are decided together. When an error is routed to the self instead of to its address, the researcher’s well-being is damaged and the error is lost to inquiry; the adaptations that follow (safe questions, discarded anomalies, work subdivided to fit the measure) are those metascience explains by incentives alone. The two costs, we propose, are effects of one regime with a shared mediating step. We distinguish the construct from ten neighbours, fix the error episode as the unit of measurement, and state six predictions with the observations that would defeat each, including one that would leave the incentive account standing and ours not. An environment that returns errors with an address protects the person and the inquiry together.
Source: PsyArXiv (OSF Preprints)
Language: English
Subfield: Education
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7214638638