When I write reviews I try to be extremely specific. Praise particular activities, describe projects, etc. Likewise with criticism.

This has the happy side effect of making it very hard to write a dishonest review.

Indeed, perhaps the opposite. After all, anonymous peer refereeing creates incentives for a different set of abuses, one of which is the ill-founded but strongly phrased report that boils down to “you didn’t cite my article/book!” or, if you did, “you didn’t fawningly parrot my argument!” IME editors know this, and treat such reports accordingly.

But isn’t this also the case in life in general. For example, if someone asks me what I think about Person X, if I like Person X I will usually just limit my comments to that point alone. This because the moment I add caveats it is the caveats that stick in the listener’s head – not the actual overall assessment.

First, I think it’s pretty well understood to be a good way to get famous as a young scientist to pick a public fight. Ideally with a senior person (preferred due to increased visibility) or another junior person if there’s a suitable ideological divide. This could be a feature of my field (psychology, neuroscience) in which either there isn’t really a dominant old guard or maybe that the old guard leaves a lot of room for other people to fight over. I don’t think it’s unique to my field, though.

Second, tenure decisions at my university are heavily based on external letters (perhaps more than some others), but a negative letter is not a killer. The culture of this process is that not only is it ok to get a “bad” letter, but that it’s a sign of impact. If somebody writes that “so-and-so is wrong about everything and this is hugely annoying!” then that’s a sign that so-and-so is a player. The killers are letters that damn by faint praise or worse, “never heard of so-and-so.”

I’m not recommending running out and picking fights or making colleagues mad (via blogs or any other way) as your field or department may be different. I’m just saying that there’s at least some small incentive towards being negative, perhaps enough to get honest appraisals now and then.

One, I suppose the grader does not normally get to choose words carefully, and must depend on the highly coded B+ to register criticism. Two, instead of having review committees (and, to a lesser extent, collegiality) to blame for the practice, grade inflation seems (in the popular(?) anti-education-establishment tradition) set at the feet of lazy students and the educators unwilling to stand up to them.

It is interesting to hear this dynamic described without the twin presumptions of worthlessness and fecklessness.