Why Trust Science? by Naomi Oreskes

Author:Naomi Oreskes
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2019-08-01T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

COMMENTS ON THE PRESENT AND FUTURE OF SCIENCE, INSPIRED BY NAOMI ORESKES

Jon A. Krosnick

Inspired by Dr. Oreskes, my comments in this essay come from the perspective not of a historian or an expert on the philosophy of science but instead from the perspective of a practitioner of science, observing the present and future of our enterprise.

I believe in the scientific quest for truth, and I believe in the scientific method. I’m glad that contemporary societies value scientific investigation, fund our work, and give us prominence in the news media. I want more young people to choose careers in science. I want scientific disciplines and professional associations to thrive. I want funding of science to increase. And I am looking forward to seeing how scientific discoveries unfold in the coming decades in constructive ways.

To help science to thrive, I cofounded, with Professor Lee Jussim from Rutgers University, the Group on Best Practices in Science (BPS) at the Center for Advanced Study at Stanford University. There are countless stories of scientific successes over many years, and in numerous instances science has gotten off track for a little while before getting back under control eventually. So one can look glowingly at the long-term history of science and smile. But very recent history tells a more distressing and alarming story. And the problem now is not a particular finding that is wrong. During the last decade, we have discovered numerous inefficiencies in science across many disciplines, and dramatic reform is needed, as I will outline in this essay.

My story begins in the field of my PhD, social psychology, with Diederik Stapel, who was the focus of a story in the New York Times because he had fabricated the data in more than one hundred publications in top journals in psychology.1 After this was discovered, numerous papers were retracted, and young coauthors suffered significantly in the process.

Daryl Bem, a very well-known social psychologist at Cornell University, published a paper in the top journal of social psychology claiming to show that extrasensory perception, ESP, was real.2 It set off a firestorm, because the results seemed implausible from the start and could not be reproduced.

John Bargh, a professor at Yale University, produced a huge amount of beloved work in social psychology. When a group of young scholars sought to reproduce a finding and failed, this led to widespread concern about the replicability of other findings as well.3 Daniel Kahneman, who won the Nobel Prize in economics, urged Dr. Bargh to engage with the critics of his work to pull the field toward an understanding of which empirical findings are real. But no such reconciliation has yet occurred.

At one time the most downloaded article in the history of the New Yorker magazine was an essay written by Jonah Lehrer about the so-called decline effect.4 In the piece, psychologist Jonathan Schooler explained how he discovered an important phenomenon, called verbal overshadowing, but the more he studied it, the weaker and weaker the effect became, until it disappeared entirely.

Another landmark paper described what were called “voodoo correlations.

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