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

by Stuart Ritchie

What about researchers who have a more ideological or political stake in the truth or falsity of a result? One of the more remarkable conflict-of-interest sections I’ve come across is in a public health paper on the so-called ‘Glasgow Effect’. This is the phenomenon whereby people from Glasgow, and Scotland more generally, die younger on average than those in other similar cities or countries, even after accounting for levels of poverty and deprivation. After reviewing the evidence on this effect, the paper concluded that the root of the unique problem was the ‘political attack’ on Scotland from Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government in the 1980s, with its policies of deindustrialisation and pushback against organised labour. There are no financial conflicts listed in the conflict-of-interest section – instead, it’s noted that the lead author, Gerry McCartney, ‘is a member of the Scottish Socialist Party.’96 Good on him, I say, for this rare degree of honesty.97 My own field, psychology, is no stranger to scientists who identify as left-wing. The skew this way in psychology is very large indeed: surveys in the United States have found the ratio of liberals to conservatives to be around 10:1. (This isn’t found in other fields, such as engineering, business studies and computer science; in all of those, as in America as a whole, the ratio is far more equal.) Psychology, being about humans and their behaviour, is normally much more intertwined with politic...