Incentive to Care

Scientific discovery and technological innovation can do and have managed extraordinary feats. However, today we hear so much questioning the reliability of the findings, and countless resources have been essentially wasted funding projects that never reach fruition. When we examine the system of scientific discovery and publication on paper, we find that it is a rigorous process that requires careful planning and execution of experiments meant to answer questions. The same question must be answered from multiple angles, proven and re-proven with each proof repeated to ensure that the manuscript sent to the reviewers is the best work the lab can offer. Multiple reviewers must then scrutinize the results and methods and send feedback often involving the original authors to run more experiments to cover any holes that might exist in the work. Finally, after publication, the article in question offers just one small answer to a problem still layered in questions, and it is the responsibility of other researchers to retest these data as they try to find their own answer to the problem.

Why then, with so many checks and balances, does this system seem to fail? In the article from The Economist “Trouble at the lab”, the author explores some of the specific issues that lead to the above problems with one of the major problems being the lack of incentive for researchers to engage in proper scientific practice. The culture of science, especially in the academic setting, follows a mantra of “publish or perish”, and journals incentivize positive and novel findings over replications of experiments or negative findings. These positive findings are much more likely to have a lower statistical power than the negative results that are found, meaning that more bias is published and fewer useful results. Additionally, other researches spend countless hours and dollars trying similar kinds of experiments not knowing that those methods have already been tried. But what researcher can afford to try to publish all their negative results or try every replication that’s in the relevant literature?

Looking at Dan Ariely’s “The Honest Truth about Dishonesty”, we can see that the human tendency to look after one’s own interest is phenomenon that is as omnipresent as it is complex. Applying some of the experimental conditions to those of the everyday conditions that many scientists face, I cannot blame any one scientist for behavior. In Ariely’s experiments, when the participants see another test taker (the actor) who very obviously cheated on the short math exam and easily profited from it, the incidence of cheating rose drastically. People compete with each other, not with integrity, for survival, and the same applies to a scientist. He might know he needs to replicate an experiment, but there’s only so many lab hours and reagents, and the draft to be sent out needs that last final spark to push it through as opposed to another replicant of a previous Western Blot. In a system where we feel like we’re being wronged, the laboratory lifestyle being very easy to imagine as one of those systems, it’s much more conceivable to justify self-promoting behavior because it’s the only way to compete with one’s colleagues who are engaging in the same practices.

However, this does not need to be the end-all for this story. More and more today, there are resources and entities seeking to remedy these problems we find in the scientific community by incentivizing behavior such as publishing methods, data, and negative results. A fellow blogger, Katherine Bricker, references in her piece the journal Cell’s mandate for investigators to list their exact methods and reagents in their “Star Methods” tab. In Ariely’s work, he found that when he asked students to recite the Ten Commandments before taking the exam, the incidence of cheating dropped to 0% astoundingly. Taking the time to remind investigators and scientists of their obligations to truthful and rigorous scientific practice and actually offering incentive for them to do so, we can change this tendency and start using our time and money more effectively and lay the foundation for stable and meaningful science in the future.

https://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21588057-scientists-think-science-self-correcting-alarming-degree-it-not-trouble

http://www.cell.com/star-methods

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2RKQkAoY3k