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

by Stuart Ritchie

In 2016, the psychologist Matti Heino applied the GRIM test to one of the most famous psychology papers of all time: Leon Festinger and James Carlsmith’s 1959 paper on ‘cognitive dissonance’13. This is the now widely known idea that forcing someone to say or do something inconsistent with their true beliefs will make them psychologically uncomfortable and they’ll do their best to alter those beliefs to make them fit with what they’ve been made to say or do. In the 1959 study, participants were made to complete some tedious, pointless tasks, such as endlessly twisting pegs around on a pegboard. When they were finished, some were paid $1 to tell the next waiting participant that they’d found the tasks really interesting and enjoyable. In an interview afterwards, the participants who’d been paid $1 to lie about the tasks reported thinking the task was much more enjoyable than those who were paid nothing. They’d reduced their dissonance, in other words, by making themselves believe they’d had fun.14 Alas, Heino’s use of the GRIM test showed that it wasn’t just the participants’ beliefs that were inconsistent – it was Festinger and Carlsmith’s numbers.15 They reported an average score of 3.08 for a sample of twenty people filling in a scale of 0-to-10, which as we just saw isn’t possible, alongside several other averages that failed the GRIM test. Cognitive dissonance is a remarkably useful concept that makes intuitive sense, and the experiment was clever and memorable. But wou...