from Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, p 234-5:

Professional controversies bring out the worst in academics. Scientific journals occasionally publish exchanges, often beginning with someone’s critique of another’s research, followed by a reply and a rejoinder. I have always thought that these exchanges are a waste of time. Especially when the original critique is sharply worded, the reply and the rejoinder are often exercises in what I have called sarcasm for beginners and advanced sarcasm. The replies rarely concede anything to a biting critique, and it is almost unheard of for a rejoinder to admit that the original critique was misguided or erroneous in any way. On a few occasions I have responded to criticisms that I thought were grossly misleading, because a failure to respond can be interpreted as conceding error, but I have never found the hostile exchanges instructive. In search of another way to deal with disagreements, I have engaged in a few “adversarial collaborations,” in which scholars who disagree on the science agree to write a jointly authored paper on their differences and sometimes  conduct research together. In especially tense situations, the research is moderated by an arbiter.

My most satisfying and predictive adversarial collaboration was with Gary Klein, the intellectual leader of an association of scholars and practitioners who do not like the kind of work I do. They call themselves students of Naturalistic Decision Making, or NDM, and mostly work in organizations where they often study how experts work. The NDMers adamantly reject the focus on biases in the heuristics and biases approach. They criticize this model as overly concerned with failures and driven by artificial experiments rather than by the study of real people doing things that matter. They are deeply skeptical of the value of using rigid algorithms to replace human judgment, and Paul Meehl is not among their heroes. Gary Klein had eloquently articulated this position over many years.

This is hardly the basis for a beautiful friendship, but there is more to the story. I had never believed that intuition is always misguided. I had also been a fan of Klein’s studies of expertise in firefighters since I first saw a draft of a paper he wrote in the 1970s, and was impressed by his book Sources of Power, much of which analyzes how experienced professionals develop intuitive skills. I invited him to join in an effort to map the boundary that separates the marvels of intuition from its flaws. He was intrigued by the idea and we went ahead with the project—with no certainty that it would succeed. We set out to answer a specific question:  When can you trust an experienced professional who claims to have an intuition? It was obvious that Klein would be more disposed to be trusting, and I would be more skeptical. But could we agree on principles for answering the general question? Over seven or eight years we had many discussions, resolved many disagreements, almost blew up more than once, wrote many drafts, became friends, and eventually published a joint article with a title that tells the story: “Conditions for Intuitive Expertise: A Failure to Disagree.” Indeed, we did not encounter real issues on which we disagreed—but we did not really agree.

from Learned Optimism by Martin Seligman, p 31-2; 40-3:

Oxford University is an intimidating place to give a lecture. It’s not so much the spires and gargoyles, or even the knowledge that for over seven hundred years this place has led the intellectual world. It’s Oxford’s dons. They had turned out in force that day in April 1975 to hear the upstart American psychologist who was on sabbatical at Maudsley Hospital’s Institute of Psychiatry in London and who had traveled to Oxford to talk about his research As I arranged my speech on the rostrum and looked nervously out into the hall, I could see the ethologist Niko Tinbergen, a 1973 Nobel laureate. I could see Jerome Bruner, a celebrated academic who had recently come to Oxford from Harvard to take the Regius professorship in child development. There too was Donald Broadbent, the founder of modern cognitive psychology and the foremost “applied” social scientist in the world, and Michael Gelder, the dean of British psychiatry. And there was Jeffrey Gray, the renowned expert on anxiety and the brain. These were the greats of my profession. I felt like an actor who has been pushed out onto a stage to do a soliloquy before Guinness, Gielgud, and Olivier.

I launched into my speech about learned helplessness, and I was relieved to find the dons reasonably responsive, some of them nodding at my conclusions, most of them chuckling at my jokes. But in the middle of the front row was an intimidating stranger. He was not laughing at my jokes, and at several crucial points he conspicuously shook his head no. He seemed to be keeping a running total of mistakes I had unknowingly made.

At last the speech was finished. The applause was appreciative, and I was relieved, for the occasion was now over except for the polite platitudes traditionally offered by the professor assigned to be the “discussant.” The discussant, however, turned out to be the naysayer from the front row. His name was given as John Teasdale. I had heard the name before but knew almost nothing about him. Teasdale, it proved, was a new lecturer in the psychiatry department, fresh up from the psychology department at Maudsley Hospital in London.

“You really shouldn’t be carried away by this enchanting story,” he told the audience. “The theory is wholly inadequate. Seligman has glossed over the fact that one-third of his human subjects never become helpless. Why not? And of the ones who did, some bounced back right away; others never recovered. Some were helpless only in the very situation they learned to be helpless about; they no longer tried to escape from noise. Yet others gave up in brand-new situations. Let us ask ourselves why. Some lost self-esteem and blamed themselves for failing to escape the noise, while others blamed the experimenter for giving them unsolvable problems. Why?”

Baffled looks appeared on many of the dons’ faces. Teasdale’s piercing critique had thrown everything into doubt. Ten years of research, which had looked definitive to me when I began the talk, now seemed full of loose ends.

I was almost dumbstruck. I thought Teasdale was right, and I was embarrassed I hadn’t thought of these objections myself. I mumbled something about this being the way science progresses and by way of rejoinder asked if Teasdale himself could solve the paradox he had set before me.

“Yes, I think I can,” he said. “But this is neither the time nor the place.”

. . .

Explanatory Style

When John Teasdale raised his objections after my speech at Oxford, I felt for a moment as if years of work might have been for nothing. I had no way of knowing at the time that the Teasdale challenge would result in the thing I wanted most of all–using our findings to help needful and suffering human beings.

Yes, Teasdale had granted in his rebuttal, two out of three people became helpless. But, he’d stressed, one out of three resisted: No matter what happened to them to make them helpless, they would not give up. It was a paradox, and until it was resolved, my theory could not be taken seriously.

Leaving the hall with Teasdale after the address, I asked him if he’d be willing to work with me to see if we could construct an adequate theory. He agreed, and we began meeting regularly. I’d come down from London and we’d take long walks through the manicured Oxford grounds and the tree-lined meadows called The Backs, talking out his objections. I asked for his solution to the problem he had posed, about who is vulnerable to helplessness and who is not. I learned that for Teasdale the solution came down to this: how people explain to themselves the bad things that happen to them. People who made certain kinds of explanations, he believed, are prey to helplessness. Teaching them to change these explanations might prove an effective way to treat their depression.

Every two months or so during this period in England, I made week-long trips back to the United States. On my first trip I returned to the University of Pennsylvania to find that my theory was being assaulted by challenges almost identical to Teasdale’s. The challengers were two fearless students in my own research group, Lyn Abramson and Judy Garber.

Lyn and Judy had both been caught up in a vogue-enthusiasm for the work of a man named Bernard Weiner. In the late 1960s Weiner, a young social psychologist at the University of California’s Los Angeles campus, had started to wonder why some people are high achievers and other people are not. He concluded that the way people think about the causes of successes and failures was what really mattered. His approach was called attribution theory. (That is, it asked to what factors people attributed their successes and failures.)

This view ran against the existing belief about achievement, the classic demonstration of which was called PREE-the partial reinforcement extinction effect. PREE is an old chestnut of learning theory. If you give a rat a food pellet every time he presses a bar, this is called “continuous reinforcement”; the ratio of reward to effort is one-to-one, one pellet for one bar-press. If you then stop giving him food for pressing the bar (“extinction”), he’ll press the bar three or four times and then quit completely, because he can see he’s never getting fed anymore, since the contrast is so great. If, on the other hand, instead of one-for-one reinforcement, you give the rat “partial” reinforcement-say, an average of only one pellet for every five or ten times he presses-and then start extinction, he’ll press the bar a hundred times before he gives up.

PREE had been demonstrated in the 1930s. It was the kind of experiment that made the reputation of B. F. Skinner and established him as the panjandrum of the behaviorists. The PREE principle, however, though it worked with rats and pigeons, didn’t work very well with people. Some would give up as soon as extinction began; others would keep going.

Weiner had an idea why it didn’t work with people: Those people who thought the cause of extinction was permanent (who concluded, for example, “The experimenter has decided not to reward me anymore”) would give up right away, while those who thought the cause was temporary (“There’s a short circuit in this damned equipment”) would keep on going, because they thought the situation might change and the reward would resume. When Weiner performed this experiment, he found just the results he predicted. It was the explanations people made, and not the schedule of reinforcement they’d been on, which determined their susceptibility to PREE. Attribution theory went on to postulate that human behavior is controlled not just by the “schedule of reinforcement” in the environment but by an internal mental state, the explanations people make for why the environment has scheduled their reinforcements in this way.

This work had great impact in the field, especially upon younger scholars like Lyn Abramson and Judy Garber. It had shaped their whole outlook, and it was the lens through which they examined the theory of learned helplessness. When, during my first trip home from England, I told my colleagues what John Teasdale had said, Lyn and Judy replied that he was right and I was wrong, and the theory would have to be reformulated.

. . .Throughout my career, I’ve never had much use for the tendency among psychologists to shun criticism. It’s a longstanding tradition acquired from the field of psychiatry, with its medical authoritarianism and its reluctance to admit error. Going back at least to Freud, the world of the research psychiatrists has been dominated by a handful of despots who treat dissenters like invading barbarians usurping their domain. One critical word from a young disciple and he was banished.

I’ve preferred the humanistic tradition. To the scientists of the Renaissance, your critic was really your ally, helping you advance upon reality. Critics in science are not like drama critics, determining flops and successes. Criticism to scientists is just another means of finding out whether they’re wrong, like running another experiment to see if it confirms or refutes a theory. Along with the advocacy principle of the courtroom, it is one of the best ways human beings have evolved to get closer to the truth.

I had always stressed to my students the importance of welcoming criticism. “I want to be told,” I had always said. “In this lab, the payoff is for originality, not toadyism.” Now Abramson and Garber, not to mention Teasdale, had told me, and I was not about to bristle with hostility. I promptly enlisted the three of them as allies in making the theory better. I argued with my two brilliant students, sometimes for twelve hours without a break, working to make my theory incorporate their objections.

I launched into two sets of conversations. The first, in Oxford, was with Teasdale. John’s commitment was to therapy, and so, as we discussed how to change the theory, we explored the possibility of treating depression by changing the ways depressive people explained to themselves the causes of bad events. The second, with Abramson and Garber back in Philadelphia, took its character from Lyn’s strong interest in the etiology—the causes—of mental illness.

Teasdale and I started writing a manuscript together, on how therapy for helplessness and depression should be based on changing people’s explanations. Concurrently, Abramson and I  started one on how people’s explanatory style could cause helplessness and depression.

At that moment, as it happened, the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Abnormal Psychology contacted me.  The learned helplessness  controversy, he said, had  generated  a great many submissions to the journal, many of them attacks of just the sort John and Lyn and Judy had made. The editor was planning to devote a whole issue of the journal to the battle, and he asked if I would write one of the articles. I agreed and then persuaded Lyn and John to let me merge the  two articles  we had been working on separately. I felt it important that when the new theory got  this very prominent airing, it would already contain our responses to the attacks. . .

The special issue of the Journal of Abnormal Psychology was published in February 1978. It contained the article by Lyn, John and me, answering in advance the main objections to the original learned-helplessness theory. It was well received and itself generated more research than the original helplessness theory had.