Bad Science: Quacks, Hacks, and Big Pharma Flacks

by Ben Goldacre

The subjects in the experiment played the role of a teacher trying to make a child arrive punctually at school for 8:30 a.m. They sat at a computer on which it appeared that each day, for fifteen consecutive days, the supposed child would arrive sometime between 8:20 and 8:40, but unbeknownst to the subjects, the arrival times were entirely random and predetermined before the experiment began. Nonetheless, all the subjects were allowed to use punishments for lateness and rewards for punctuality, in whatever permutation they wished. When they were asked at the end to rate their strategy, 70 percent concluded that reprimand was more effective than reward in producing punctuality from the child. These subjects were convinced that their intervention had an effect on the punctuality of the child, despite the child’s arrival time being entirely random and exemplifying nothing more than regression to the mean. By