Can Science Get Political?
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What does the study reveal about political beliefs affecting scientific results?
We're here because your heightened awareness deserves heightened entertainment. The Last Show with David Cooper. We interview a lot of scientists on this show about their research. But what if we gave two different researchers the same data set? It turns out their political beliefs might nudge their results in opposite directions. That's according to a new study, which to me raises some unsettling questions. Some pretty human questions about bias and how science gets made. I'm here with someone who worked on that research. He is a social and behavioral science researcher at the German Institute for Adult Education. And his name is Nate Bresnau. Nate, welcome in. Hey, David.
Thanks so much for having me on the show.
I think this is like the biggest worry in science, right? Like someone's personal beliefs can affect their results.
How was the research study structured and what were its findings?
Do you want to walk me through the study, how you set it up and maybe what you found?
Sure. The original study got together 73 different research teams with 158 different researchers in those teams. And we gave them the same data and same hypothesis. And we wanted them to test the same research question. And the research question was immigration reduces support for social welfare programs, social security programs. And they came to all different results. And, you know, from really strong positive effect, really strong negative effect and everything in between. And that was pretty surprising in some ways, but in some ways not. And that probably has to do with what I might call like two categories of variation. And one of them is more like noise, stuff we don't know about. And one of them is more like bias, stuff where we can look at
attributes of the researchers that might have caused those different results.
You say on the one hand, it was like kind of surprising, maybe shocking. On the other hand, maybe kind of obvious.
What are the implications of bias in scientific research?
But I think in both cases, these results are a little bit uncomfortable. I guess, where do we go from here? Where do we go knowing that like the same researchers who may be giving governments data about how to create programs would come to these different results?
There's probably two good suggestions. And one of them is that we as scientists could be more humble about what we're doing. And if we have some findings we want to share with the public or with the government, we should be cautious about what we're recommending they do with that until many other researchers have also looked at a similar, you know, done similar studies or also looked at the data. So if we can see a consensus where a lot of researchers are coming to similar results, that's when we should start to think, okay, here we really have something. Rather than relying on any one, because if you pulled any one result from our study, it's not very representative of the universe of results that a scientist might come to, any random scientist, if they were to study the topic.
There's two things. One, I'm thinking like when you actually choose who works on a study, should that be part of the methodology? Like should we be looking at what kind of scientists, what their beliefs are before actually jumping in and assemble a team that has a wide array of beliefs? Is that one maybe solution to this problem?
Yeah, you kind of hit the nail on the head there. There's starting to be a movement, if you want to call it that, to do what's called an adversarial collaboration, where scientists who have maybe different opinions or different theories or even different ideological positions get together and design studies together.
How can researchers mitigate bias in their studies?
and agree on the criteria in advance. They say, okay, like we're going to do the study like this. We all agree this is the way to do it and, you know, and agree on what the results mean in advance. So they say like, if we get results A, that means there's a positive effect. If we get results B, there's a negative and C, there's no effect. And so they already like clarify all that in advance. And so that would be a good way to avoid some of this bias that might creep into the process.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
What does the study reveal about political beliefs affecting scientific results?
0:03–0:51
2
How was the research study structured and what were its findings?
0:51–2:03
3
What are the implications of bias in scientific research?
2:03–3:50
4
How can researchers mitigate bias in their studies?
3:50–5:12
5
What are questionable research practices and why are they problematic?
5:12–6:28
6
How can transparency and open science improve research integrity?
6:28–7:32
7
What steps can be taken to ensure science remains trustworthy?
7:32–10:04
Speakers
3 identifiedMore from The Last Show with David Cooper
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