Short abstract

There are indications that grant review processes are conservative, disadvantaging novel research proposals. This study asks: What are the underlying mechanisms that might explain grant peer review's apparent conservatism?

Long abstract

The study is based on observations of 75 panels and interviews with 82 panellists, carried out over a 3-year period. The data set includes eight different funding competitions in five different research funding organisations in national, Nordic and EU settings. The quantity and variety that the empirical material covers are unparalleled by any previous qualitative studies of grant peer review.

There are indications that a complexity of mechanisms interact to produce conservative grant reviews. Panellists' tendency to focus on proposals' faults over their potential and their preference for sure over unsure outcomes leads to conservatism in individual assessments. Panel interaction in turn tends to strengthen individual panellists’ negativity dominance and risk avoidance, indicating group polarisation mechanisms are at play. However, panellists' negativity dominance is responsive to environment-level factors. The operationalisation of the scoring scale in instructions to reviewers aggravates negativity dominance when guidance equates top-scoring proposals with fault-free ones. Low success rates furthermore aggravates negativity dominance. In cases with low success rates, panellists tend to see their tasks as a rejection task, focusing on eliminating applications and thus on negative over positive aspects of proposals. A fault-focused scoring scale exerts a similar effect, reinforcing panellists' natural penchant to accord more weight to negative over positive aspects of proposals.

In conclusion, individual assessments of grant proposals favour safe and fault-free proposals. Environment-level factors and panel interaction reinforce rather than counteract these tendencies. Outcomes accordingly tend towards conservatism.