Comment by mswen

I had a grad school mentor William Wells who taught us something similar. A good research publication or presentation should aim for "just the right amount of surprise".

Too much surprise and the scientific audience will dismiss you out of hand. How could you be right while all the prior research is dead wrong?

Conversely, too little surprise and the reader / listener will yawn and say but of course we all know this. You are just repeating standard knowledge in the field.

Despite the impact on audience reception we tend to believe that most fields would benefit from robust replication studies and the researchers shouldn't be penalized for confirming the well known.

And, sometimes there really is paradigm breaking research and common knowledge is eventually demonstrated to be very wrong. But often the initial researchers face years or decades of rejection.