The False Promise of Sexiness: Perceived Importance, Interest, and Citation Patterns for Counterintuitive Research Findings

Decisions about what research is pursued, funded, published, and reported on by the media are often based on what scientific results are perceived as important and interesting. Here, we study one potential cue that scientists and the public may use for evaluating scientific findings—their counterintuitiveness. Two studies establish that counterintuitive findings are perceived as more important and interesting, both by scientists and the public. However, even though judgments of importance predict citations in both samples, counterintuitiveness does not. We argue that these results have implications for scientific institutions and practice.