Full disclosure of biases and potential conflicts of interest are taken very seriously in science. Research and journal publication require full disclosure of potential conflicts of interests. Harsh disciplinary action can be taken against academics who fail to disclose any potential conflicts of interests. While this does not guarantee that no particular scientist will break the rules, it does function as an effective deterrent.
Biases might affect the hypotheses and the area of research, but are far less likely to affect the results. A strong example of this is the largest study ever conducted on the effects of intercessory prayer, conducted by the Templeton Foundation. The current President of the Templeton Foundation, John M. Templeton, Jr., is an evangelical Christian. The funded study basically set out to provide evidence that praying for others to get better was demonstrably effective—an area of research and hypothesis clearly influenced by the group’s biases and personal beliefs. However, the results of the study not only failed to support their hypothesis, but also showed that when people know they are being prayed for, they were worse off physically1. Although the scientific process transcends personal biases and beliefs, it is not impossible for personal biases and beliefs to cause scientists to deliberately and dishonestly manipulate the results. If science comprised just one scientist, this would be a major problem—but it doesn’t, so it isn’t.
Science is self-correcting. The methodology sections of papers require very clear details of how the research was conducted so that other scientists can replicate the research. If any errors, biases, or “shenanigans” that affected the results made their way into the research (but not the disclosed methodology), replication would produce different results. Repeated attempts at confirming the results of the study by different researchers would provide further evidence against the claims and conclusions of the initial study. Scientific consensus is based on an understanding of the collection of research on a given topic—not just a few cherry-picked studies. Researchers take part in the peer-review process who know how to read a scientific paper and spot errors in the methodology and even the occasional fraudulent study. A humorous (but also disturbing) example is a scientist who found 130 “gibberish” papers that were computer generated and successfully published in scientific journals2. These papers were all subsequently pulled from the journals.
If you don’t trust scientists with scientific information, who do you trust with it?
In many cases, the cause of distrust in science is a result of the opinions of other people. These other people are often, friends, political commentators, the media, religious leaders, and former Playboy bunnies. Scientists are rarely as familiar as your friends, passionate as political commentators, visible as the media, certain as religious leaders, and sexy as former Playboy bunnies, but these traits of the messenger are independent of the truth of the message. The question you need to ask, is why would any of these groups with all the same biases and corruptible tendencies but none of the knowledge, checks and balances, and strict guidelines of the scientific method be more trustworthy on scientific issues? The answer is, they’re not. If you need advice on what to serve for a dinner party, ask your friend. If you want to know what those floaty things are in your eye, ask a scientist.
No matter how many rebels scream that the earth is flat, and no matter how many papers they manage to publish with “evidence” that might support that conclusion (none, for the record), the fact of the oblique spheroid earth will not be suppressed by any person or group’s political or religious interests, no matter how big their pocketbook. This is why we should trust science as the best way we have to separate fact from fiction, trust any overwhelming scientific consensus, but still reserve a healthy dose of skepticism for the claims of any one paper, article, or scientist.
Why Trust Science When It Keeps Changing Its Mind?
“In science it often happens that scientists say, ‘You know that’s a really good argument; my position is mistaken,’ and then they actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again... . I cannot recall the last time something like that has happened in politics or religion.” - Carl Sagan, 1987 CSICOP address
You should trust science as a process for separating fact from fiction because of its flexibility to update theories and findings based on new information—and because it is the best method we have. The idea that “science keeps changing its mind” is based more on the public’s perception of science that actual science. There are several reasons for this.
First, a possible explanation as to why the idea that science is less trustworthy because it adjusts its claims in response to new information could have its roots in religious dogma. In the United States, over 80% of the population identifies with some religion3. The majority of these practitioners believe that certain and unchanging knowledge can be obtained from inerrant holy books, Papal infallibility, or divine inspiration. Compared to that, any form of probability-based knowledge, such as the kind obtained by the scientific method, is inferior. In many cases, science and religion can co-exist in harmony, but in some cases, they can’t. This is one of those cases. The belief in certain and unchanging knowledge from inerrant holy books, Papal infallibility, or divine inspiration not only undermines the probabilistic world in which we live, but leads to a refusal to accept data that contradicts what is believed to be “divine Truth” (there are too many resources that demonstrate the problems with “divine Truth,” so I will not go into that here).
Scientists change their views based on new information—this is the foundation of learning. Science is a process of discovery. As we learn more, that new information is used to update existing findings, therefore, converging on what we might refer to as a convergence of data or a scientific consensus. According to Wikipedia, a scientific consensus is “the collective judgment, position, and opinion of the community of scientists in a particular field of study. Consensus implies general agreement, though not necessarily unanimity.” In science, specific views change frequently, and general consensuses change occasionally. Strong scientific consensuses on well-established theories rarely change but are still provisional. To the non-scientist, there isn’t much difference between a scientific view and a scientific consensus, but in the field of science, the difference is as drastic as the difference between a 6000-year-old and 13.8 billion-year-old universe.
People (thanks to the media) often latch onto specific studies and equate those findings with science “making up its mind.” The field of science shares some of this responsibility—science communication is and has always been a problem. The media need viewers and sensationalize and exaggerate findings and conclusions when writing about a scientific discovery, often in the form of inferring a much greater level of confidence or even certainty when the findings are actually much more conservative. In the figure below, we see a blogger’s interpretation of the headline, then the actual headline from a scientific source. Notice how the blogger not only moved from a may be to an is, but also greatly embellished the findings. Another example of this can be found in a recent study on life after death.