Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth

by Stuart Ritchie

The psychophysiologist James Heathers has set up a novelty Twitter account that exists solely to retweet misleading news headlines from translational studies, such as ‘Scientists Develop Jab that Stops Craving for Junk Food’ or ‘Compounds in Carrots Reverse Alzheimer’s-Like Symptoms’ with a simple but accurate addition: ‘… IN MICE’.21 The third kind of hype found by the Cardiff team was possibly the most embarrassing. Everyone, especially scientists, is supposed to know that correlation is not causation.22 This basic insight is taught in every elementary statistics course and is a perennial feature of public debates about science, education, economics and more. When scientists look at an observational dataset, where data have been gathered without any randomised experimental intervention – say, a study charting the growth in children’s vocabulary as they get older – they’re generally just looking at correlations. That’s nothing to be ashamed of: there’s a lot we can learn about how things relate to each other in the world and building up an accurate picture of patterns of correlation is an essential foundation for understanding systems like the brain or society. We need to be awfully careful about how we interpret those correlations, however.