Alternatively, what single concept from statistics would most improve people's interpretations of popular news and daily life events?

I've only ever seen publication bias taught with made-up or near-miss examples.  Has anyone got a really well-documented case in which:

* (About) nine people independently get the idea for the same experiment because it seems like it should be there, and they all see that nothing has been published on it, so they all work on it, and all get a (true) null result.

* The tenth experiment is eventually published reporting an NHST effect of about p = 0.10 

* The slow (g)rumbling of science surfaces the nine previous, unpublished versions of that experiment and someone catches it and gets it all down, with citations and dates and the specifics of whichever effect these ten people found themselves rooting around for.

The most representative real-world example I've seen lately has been Bem/psi, but, as a pedagogical example, I find it too distracting.  The ideal example would report on an effect that's more sympathetic, that a sharp student or outsider would say "Yeah, I'd also have thought that effect would have come through."

Thanks.

I have this belief that humility is a part of good critical thinking, and that egoism undermines it.  I imagine arrogance as a kind of mind-death.  But I have no evidence, and no good mechanism by which it might be true.  In fact, I know the belief is suspect because I know that I want it to be true — I want to be able to assure myself that this or that intolerable academic will be magically punished with a decreased capacity to do good work. The truth could be the opposite: maybe hubris breeds confidence, and confidence results? After all, some of the most important thinkers in history were insufferable.

Is any link, positive or negative, between arrogance and reasoning too tenuous to be worth entertaining? Is humility a pretty word or a valuable habit? I don't know what I think yet.   Do you?