The Trouble With Scientists

[Simon]

How One Psychologist Is Tackling Human Biases in Science

A really interesting blog at Nautilus (I'm using some of its brilliant lines), which argues that

“One of the larger issues is getting scientists to stop fooling themselves. This requires elimination of motivated reasoning and confirmation bias”

Or put another way, scientists (psychologists) have been strong on identifying cognitive bias (aka flawed thinking), but surprisingly blind when it comes to applying this insight to themselves.

Brian Nosek, the psychologist behind the reproducibility project and star of this blog elaborated

Psychologists have shown that “most of our reasoning is in fact rationalization,” he says. In other words, we have already made the decision about what to do or to think, and our “explanation” of our reasoning is really a justification for doing what we wanted to do—or to believe—anyway. Science is of course meant to be more objective and skeptical than everyday thought—but how much is it, really?

“How do I get from mush to beautiful results?”​

The background to all this is the widely-acknowledged problem that scientists are rewarded for high proflie eye-catching studies, however flaky, and penalised for not doing this.

“To get tenure, grants, and recognition, scientists need to publish frequently in major journals,” he says. “That encourages positive and ‘breakthrough’ findings, since the latter are what earn citations and impact factor. So it’s not terribly surprising that scientists fool themselves into seeing perfect groundbreaking results among their experimental findings

Nosek then explains how this causes problems on the ground, given that such crystal clear results are rare:

But “most of what happens in the lab doesn’t look like that”, says Nosek—instead, it’s mush. “How do I get from mush to beautiful results?” he asks. “I could be patient, or get lucky—or I could take the easiest way, making often unconscious decisions about which data I select and how I analyze them, so that a clean story emerges. But in that case, I am sure to be biased in my reasoning.”

The blog goes on to look at the reverse problem, where group think blocks more dramatic new ideas emerging:

The suggestions by geneticist Barbara McClintock in the 1940s and ’50s that some DNA sequences can “jump” around chromosomes, and by biochemist Stanley Prusiner in the 1980s that proteins called prions can fold up into entirely the wrong shape and that the misfolding can be transmitted from one protein to another, went so much against prevailing orthodoxy that both researchers were derided mercilessly—until they were proved right and won Nobel prizes.

The ability of an entrenched Old Guard to stop better ideas emerging is captured by Max Planck's famous quote:

Science advances one funeral at a time

The answer?
Slightly less excitingly, Nosek is keen to set up a better way of doing science by launching a pre-registration scheme for research called the Open Science Framework (OSF). This is based on pharmacological research, where decades of hiding disappointing results and spinning findings led to regulators requiring all results, good and bad, to be published and the goals of a study to be set out explicitly before it started, not written to suit findings after the results are out. So oddly the bad boy of pharmacoloy research has become a good example (though hardly perfect).

[Ironically, perhaps, as getting dud results into licensed drugs has become harder, pharmacology has really focused on replication of early drug findings - no point persuing useless leads if the regulator will find you out before you can reach the market]

Read the full blog