Low-powered studies disproportionately feed industry propaganda

Evidence

Most disciplines recognize the importance of studies in which more data are gathered. (All else being equal, studies with more data are said to have higher statistical power, which is widely recognized as essential to rigorous science.) Despite this, low-powered studies seem to be a continuing problem. The prevalence of such studies is related to the so-called replication crisis facing the behavioral and medical sciences. In a widely reported 2010 study, a group of psychologists were able to reproduce only thirty-six of one hundred published results from their field. In a 2016 poll run by the journal Nature, 70 percent of scientists across disciplines said they had failed to reproduce another scientist’s result (and 50 percent said they had failed to reproduce a result of their own). Since replicability is supposed to be a hallmark of science, these failures to replicate are alarming. — Cailin O’Connor and James Owen Weatherall, The Misinformation Age, 386

Categorization

• XREF: The replication crisis figures (36/100, 70%, 50%) offer hard numbers to any writing on reproducibility or propaganda. — connects to: Industry cherry-picking is continuous with ordinary scientific publication bias — Cailin O’Connor and James Owen Weatherall, The Misinformation Age: How False…, 359; Concentrating research funding can make science more propaganda-proof — Cailin O’Connor and James Owen Weatherall, The Misinformation Age: How False…, 384; Industry can distort science simply by funding the researchers who suit it — Cailin O’Connor and James Owen Weatherall, The Misinformation Age: How False…, 400 (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• Industry-funded television research suppressed unfavorable findings and used straw-man tests #exemplifies (0.90)
• Purportedly objective scholarship can function as propaganda against its subject #corroborates (0.85) — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 801
• The broadcast industry systematically suppressed adverse media-effects research #exemplifies (0.85)
• Some policy debates feature one side uninterested in truth where scholarship is propaganda #corroborates (0.80) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 829
• Industries used proxy institutes to secretly fund biased research #expands (0.72)