Fraud, Compromise, and Groupthink: How Warped Research Incentives Undermine Science

Science is meant to be self-correcting, but is this true in practice? In psychology, several influential theories on human behavior and morality were later found to be based on fraudulent studies, including the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Kitty Genovese assault. Microbiology is rife with fraudulent images. Psychiatrists continue to endorse the long-debunked “chemical imbalance” theory of depression in research articles and to patients when prescribing selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). In public health and medicine, many agencies are more concerned with restricting rather than endorsing what is perhaps the most highly-effective and highly impactful solution (e-cigarettes) to the primary cause of preventable premature death (smoking). 

What is going on in science? Are these all isolated cases? Unfortunately, reflecting on my decade in academic research, my answer is “no.”  Not every scientific research area is flawed, of course, but so many instances point to a common thread. One paper points to the structure of modern academia: 

“We are losing sight of the academic mission: to think, to enquire, to design and perform new research, to innovate, to teach and communicate our findings for the purpose of societal improvement… a key contributor has been the corporatization of academic institutions. In principle, there is nothing wrong with making universities strong businesses. However, a key problem has been that instead of facilitating academic work, these systems have created obstacles to performing the core mission.”  

The academy’s ostensible purpose is to advance knowledge, trusting in science to continually self-correct. In practice, however, the academy has grown into a bureaucracy that primarily serves itself, sidelining the very mission it was created for; a textbook case of Pournelle’s iron law of bureaucracy. Instead, science has become susceptible to groupthink determined by funding agencies, which has compromised scientific integrity, hindered improvements in public health and medicine, and lost the trust of ordinary people.