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Full Version: Distorting scientific findings: Death by press release
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https://areomagazine.com/2021/06/17/dist...s-release/

EXCERPTS: Despite the current zeitgeist, in which many prefer to approach questions of fact through postmodernist analysis, other ways of knowing or lived experience—for many questions, there is no better source of understanding than well conducted empirical research. Of course, most of us cannot do that research ourselves: we depend upon scientists, university public relations departments and professional science associations to communicate research findings clearly and accurately. But, too often, they—consciously or unconsciously—exaggerate the strength of evidence or findings, or gloss over inconsistencies, and thus misinform the public. (I call this death by press release.) As a result, we should be somewhat cautious when we read about new research findings in the news.

To illustrate how this distortion can happen, I’d like to walk you through a particular study. I chose it because it’s pretty well designed, despite some flaws, and fairly representative, and because the flaws are very common in social and medical science studies. The study purports to examine the relationship between violent pornography and teen dating violence.

[...] Such communications are particularly likely to grossly distort public understanding when the research relates to emotionally or morally touchy topics, where nuanced or messy data may conflict with a prevailing social narrative. Pornography is one of those topics; other examples include race and policing, and whether the mentally ill are more likely to engage in violence (for some conditions they are, particularly if substance abuse is also involved).

Researchers engage in distorting communications because they are human, and because, historically, every incentive has pushed them in that direction. Messy, muddled results get fewer newspaper headlines, attract less excitement and grant funds, and win fewer accolades. Most of us enjoy being praised for being on message—and want to avoid the costs of producing data that’s off message—whether those costs are less attention, reduced funding, fewer professional honours or even getting cancelled. Accurately communicated results often don’t tell us the neat, orderly stories we human beings prefer to hear. Most of us would rather hear that violent porn harms kids than something like, We tried to measure violent porn, but maybe accidently included Shakespeare in that definition, and whatever it was we were actually measuring, it was associated to some extent, in some people, with a few bad outcomes, but was not related to other bad outcomes in the way you might have assumed it would be.

So why believe in science at all? Because science remains the only way of knowing that eventually self-corrects. Sure, sometimes research gets things completely wrong, and sometimes the self-correction takes longer than it should. But eventually, sceptical souls start prodding at received wisdom, and accurate data wins. Today’s new approaches, such as the open science movement, can speed up this self-correction process, helping scientists produce research that is both more rigorous and more transparent, making it easier to fact-check.

Meanwhile, general readers should be cautious and sceptical consumers of information about scientific research. The science that hits a newspaper headline isn’t always reliable, and professional groups have motives for not always telling us the unvarnished truth. We can be cautious and sceptical without indulging in the science denialism that has become prevalent on both the right and left. Science remains the best way for us to understand the world around us; we just have to remember that scientists, too, are human... (MORE - missing details)
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Cynical Sindee: If it's output of the human or social sciences, there's a non-trivial chance of the "research" being inutility or craphood, anyway, regardless of news mediating factors. In addition to their publish or perish anxieties, such disciplines can serve as an academic laundering front for cleaning the dogma from humanities and campus ideologies, so that those intellectual scams look bolstered by non-bias and science.