ITRN award 2024 to Stefano Dalla Bona and Michele Vicovaro

The Italian Reproducibility Network (ITRN) is a peer-driven consortium aimed at identifying the root causes of unreliable research practices and proposing strategies to address them, ultimately improving research quality. To promote this ethos, ITRN presents three awards annually to individuals who have made significant contributions to research that is reproducible, replicable, or adheres to open science principles.

The research conducted by Dalla Bona and Vicovaro has been awarded due to its generalization and replication attempt of previous findings that supported how a specific cognitive bias, the illusion of causality, could be reduced when information was perceptually degraded. However, the findings by Dalla Bona and Vicovaro represented a failed generalization attempt, highlighting the critical importance of replication studies before general assertions are made in the scientific literature.