The Bias in Science

Science has a bias problem.

This became clear when I typed the term “scientific bias” into a Google search bar, and 1,470,000 results popped up. Some of the results included simple definitions of research bias to help scientists understand what research bias is so they can avoid it. But by and large, most of the results were articles published in newspapers and magazines like The Washington Post, The Economist, Wired, and Forbes to name a few.

However, in scrolling through these articles, I noticed something: science has a bias problem. But not the one I expected (which means I went into this search biased). The real bias problem is two-pronged, consisting of both bias in research and the bias of those who consume scientific information.  

The first prong—bias in research—has been widely written about and is a big discussion within the scientific community. One of the articles I found, hypothesizes that some of the bias in science that leads to false claims or experiments that cannot be reproduced stems from the pressure within academia to “publish or perish.” Theorizing that this mentality encourages scientists to take shortcuts in the number of replicates they do in testing a hypothesis leading to the publication of false positives. Other articles believe that some of the bias in science is a failing of the pre-publication peer review process. Where the increasing demand on scientists means they aren’t taking the time to fully assess what they are reading and find mistakes and possible research misconduct. But the consensus seems to be that these things contribute to irreproducibility in science and allow for the publication of unsubstantiated work.

While this is certainly a problem, because it is taking place in labs worldwide, the community is taking steps to fix this. For instance, Science magazine is requiring rigorous description and justification of replicates and statistical analysis, a trend that is being seen in in other journals as well. In addition to more stringent requirements, other third-party websites such as PubPeer allow researchers to anonymously review published papers in the hopes of identifying research misconduct that can lead to irreproducibility. PubMed Commons allows similar reviews to be made, though they are not anonymous. Hopefully, given time and support from scientists, the scientific community can crack down on the publication of biased and irreproducible papers.

However, the second prong—bias in information consumption—is potentially more problematic. Due to the internet, it is so easy to simply search for articles that support your point of view on a particular topic, which introduces confirmation bias. While anyone can have this confirmation bias, people without scientific background are especially susceptible to it, as they don’t have the training to critically analyze the scientific basis of what they are reading. This allows misinformation to spread, as it did in the wake of Andrew Wakefield’s now retracted article suggesting that vaccines cause autism. For someone without scientific training it is hard to understand how something that is “wrong” could have gotten published, especially when there appears to be so much science backing it up. It is this that allows science to be twisted by the media and used as a weapon, as asserted in this article. That is why bias in scientific information consumption could be almost more dangerous that bias in the lab...because there are no real mechanisms in place to correct this sort of confirmation bias.

In order to solve—or even begin to address science’s bias problem, it will require the scientific community to bridge the gap between academia and the general public.