In recent years, the reliability of scientific research has been criticised. This issue received widespread academic and media attention after Brian Nosek, a social psychologist and head of the ‘Center for Open Science’, published, alongside 269 co-authors, a research article on their findings that they were only able to produce only 39 successful replications out of a 100 replications of 98 experiments, which had been published alongside their original results in scientific journals. This research was conducted solely in the field of Psychology, but the issue is not confined solely to the field of Psychology; 52% of 1576 surveyed researchers from a variety of scientific fields agreed that there is a reproducibility crisis in Science, and only 3% of those researchers denied the existence of such a crisis. This crisis is commonly referred to as the ‘Replication Crisis’, and, despite the popular attention of the issue being mostly constrained to its presence in the field of psychology, a fact that can be partly attributed to the increased openness of psychological research and the innate difficulties in performing reliable psychological experiments with the minimal influence of unconscious biases, the Replication Crisis has adverse implications for all fields of scientific research and, by extension, our lives and perceptions.
The Replication Crisis degrades the quality, authority and reliability of scientific research. If the results of research cannot be trusted, potentially beneficial or otherwise important findings may be dismissed or ignored, or, perhaps more troubling, the application of ideas based on flawed research could result in adverse effects, such as the adoption of harmful practices or ineffective medical treatments. The Replication Crisis has had numerous causes attributed to it, and many of these causes are interconnected. For the purposes of this article, I have attempted to group the different causes into two main causes, but even those two causes do not act independently of one another.
Firstly, researchers are often pressured to produce papers frequently to gain and maintain their prestige and relevance in their field, in order to make them an attractive candidate for employers. In addition, many researchers are required by their employers to meet periodical quotas of published papers as proof of their productiveness. While some people argue that such pressure is beneficial as an incentive for researchers to publish their work, where it can be accessed by the scientific community after careful scrutinisation and peer-review, the process of ‘Publish or Perish’, a joking name used by many researchers for this pressure, incentivises researchers to publish their papers with a prioritisation of quantity over quality, and prevents them from developing significant research agendas.
Secondly, academic publishers are selective of what they publish, and are more likely to publish research that garners attention and revenue. As a result, results with interesting or shocking results are prioritised; a single paper that has a positive result for the success of a new drug is more likely to be published than the multiple others that failed to find any such success. This leads to a ‘Publication Bias’ favouring positive results, or, in some cases, particularly surprising negative results, over well-performed research. This publication bias further incentivises researchers to sacrifice the quality of their work, this time in favour of generating favourable, over reliable, results in order to ensure that their research is published.
While unreproducible results are commonly caused by the lack of improper care, precautions and analysis, due to the earlier mentioned prioritisation of quantity over quality, in some instances, unreliable results are deliberately generated and published. Such results are created through the manipulation or misuse of statistical data, in a process commonly referred to as ‘Data Dredging’. An example of a common tactic of Data Dredging is ‘P-Hacking’, in which an inappropriately large amount of parameters and variables are collected and analysed from a sample-group, causing correlations to emerge solely because of the sheer quantity of potential hypotheses; P-Hacking often involves another misuse of data, which is the development of a hypothesis from the data, as opposed to the Scientific Method’s collection of data to test a hypothesis, which was formed beforehand. Another example of Data Dredging is the reduction of a sample-size to produce more favourable results; a sample of 100 people may not provide a statistically significant result, so the researchers may reduce the sample-size to 50 individuals with a selection bias in favour of favourable results, falsely producing the desired results. Researchers are incentivised to deliberately produce unreliable results by the publication bias, and, while the process of peer-review often exposes the effects of Data Dredging, some of these results are inevitably published, aided by their favourability to publishers.
Some people blame the creation of these harmful incentives and processes on the personal faults of researchers, publishers and other academic organisations, but the issue is systematic. In a Capitalist system, individuals and organisations need to garner a profit, via an unbalanced exchange of resources, which are defined in this explanation as not only physical goods, but also information, labour, and other exchangeable services, in their favour, in order to acquire surplus resources, which are needed to fulfil their requirements and desires. According to Capitalist theory, resources are exchanged on a ‘Free Market’. Capitalism also imposes a scarcity of resources through private ownership of resources and their means of production, creating the need for competition within the Free Market between individuals for resources. This creates a ‘Profit Motive’, in which the greatest production and smallest expenditure of profit is strongly incentivised. A full description, explanation or analysis of Capitalism is beyond both the scope and intent of this article, and this explanation may be seen as a gross oversimplification of the system, but the chief point is that a Capitalist system generates a Profit Motive. The Profit Motive is an important incentive, and the Capitalist system is harmful to individuals who do not act in accordance with it; if Business A generates less profit, or expends more profit than is necessary, it will be outcompeted by the similar Business B, which acts in accordance with the Profit Motive, as Business B will purchase resources to allow it to outcompete or, perhaps, directly impede Business A, doing so because the competition from Business A causes some profit to be diverted away from Business B, and will be able to do so as a result of its superior generation of profit.
Academic Publishers are also subject to the Profit Motive, and this directly creates the Publication Bias. Publishers generate profit by selling access to their published papers and articles to interested individuals and organisations, such as Universities, and are so incentivised to publish work that will generate the greatest amount of interest, and, therefore, demand for access to the published work, in order to generate the maximum amount of profit. As mentioned before, this favours the publication of surprising, interesting research over reliable, well-performed research. A Publisher, who prioritised reliable research over interesting research, would be out-competed by other publishers, who prioritise more profitable research. The process of Publish or Perish can also be claimed to be caused by the Profit Motive. Researchers are paid by their respective employers in exchange for their work, but the researchers are, and have to be, paid less than the value of their labour in order for the employers to generate profit; in order to ensure that they do not pay the researchers more than the value of their labour, employers set quotas of published papers in order to ensure the productiveness of the researchers, creating a prioritisation of quantity over quality in the work of the researchers. It would be incorrect to blame the Profit Motive as being the sole cause of the Replication Crisis, but it would not be incorrect to claim that it has a significant role in the issue.
Other issues created by the Capitalist System could also be attributed to the Replication Crisis. For example, researchers generate profit by being given a wage in exchange for their labour, and, without this profit, they cannot purchase the resources that are required to maintain a good standard of living, such as food, water, shelter and, in some nations, healthcare. A larger profit will be better able to secure these resources, and a larger wage results in a larger profit. Therefore, the process of Publish or Perish can be partly attributed to the fact that positions, within the field of Science, that provide larger wages require the constant maintenance and development of academic prestige and relevance via the publication of papers, mandating a prioritisation of quantity over quality; researchers are heavily incentivised to aim to acquire such positions as failing to do so is equivalent to failing to secure a larger wage, resulting in the loss of security in their ability to require necessary resources. In this example, it could be said that the Profit Motive does, indeed, play some role, but it is the threat, against the researchers, of the lack of sufficient security for their standard of living that acts as the primary incentive. However, while other issues, both systematic and those that cannot be directly attributed to Capitalism, do exist and are problematic to scientific research, the Profit Motive is the primary incentive for a significant, and, in the opinion of some, more diabolical problem to the field of Science: The interference, both direct and indirect, of industries and corporations within scientific research.
Scientific research can uncover problems with the processes and products of large industries, which deter people from purchasing the goods of the industry. An example of this is the discovery of the adverse health effects of smoking, which caused large numbers of people to dramatically reduce their purchase of the tobacco products of the Tobacco Industry. A reduction in the sales of their products directly reduces the generated profit of the industry, but, in other situations, the generated profit of an industry can be reduced as the result of pressure from governments and consumers, which force the industry to adopt more expensive practices in order to mitigate the damages that the industry causes. The Profit Motive, therefore, as a result of these potential reductions of generated profit, strongly incentivises industries to suppress scientific research that endangers the profit of the industry, and, in another technique, support and, in some cases, generate scientific research that defends the products and processes of the industry. Industries are able to manipulate scientific research by funding research to their benefit, and by funding efforts to interfere with the dissemination of research that oppose their interest.
The manipulation of scientific research can be performed in a variety of ways. The Sugar Industry, for example, funded research into the harmful effects of the excessive consumption of saturated fats whilst discouraging research into the harmful effects of the excessive consumption of sucrose, which is the industry’s chief product; this manipulation served to divert the attention of the public against saturated fats in order to prevent people from potentially reducing their consumption and purchases of sucrose, protecting the profit of the Sugar Industry.
A more recent example of the manipulation of scientific research by an industry is the Fossil Fuel industry’s deliberate ignorance and denial of knowledge regarding the role of fossil fuels in Climate Change. It received some degree of media attention when it was revealed that a corporation within the Fossil Fuel industry, ‘Exxon’, now known as ‘ExxonMobil’, had been aware of Climate Change and its own involvement in it since 1977, when its senior scientist, James Black, informed the management committee of Exxon about the primary culpability of the burning of fossil fuels in the warming of the Planet’s climate; a year later, Black warned the company that doubling the amount of carbon dioxide, via the burning of fossil fuels, in the atmosphere would result in a 2-3° increase in global average temperature, a claim that is supported by the modern consensus. Despite this knowledge, Exxon continued to deny the need for concern and action regarding Climate Change for the next few decades, providing $30,000,000 US Dollars in funding to organisations that promote such denial, and helping to prevent the United States of America’s involvement in the 1998 Kyoto Protocol, an international effort to control Climate Change. Exxon suppressed the dissemination of the scientific knowledge surrounding Climate Change by promoting doubt regarding such knowledge via paid advertisements in media, such as ‘The New York Times’; researchers found that while, during the period of 1977-2014, 83% of Exxon’s peer-reviewed papers acknowledged the human role in Climate Change, 81% of its advertisements, during this same period of time, expressed doubt about it, further demonstrating that Exxon made deliberate attempts to misguide the opinion and knowledge of the Public regarding Climate Change. Such manipulation was performed with the intent to protect the profitability of Exxon by preventing public knowledge from decreasing consumption of fossil fuels, and pressuring Exxon to adopt potentially costly practices to mitigate the effects of its activities on the Climate.
Perhaps the most infamous manipulation of scientific research and knowledge was performed by the Tobacco Industry. In Germany, during the first years of the twenty-first century, Tobacco was the leading cause of premature death, being attributed to between 110,000 and 140,000 deaths per year, yet the German Government refused to implement any effective regulation of Tobacco, and even made repeated attempts to prevent policies of Tobacco Control within European Legislation. It has been alleged that the German Government was being influenced by the Tobacco Industry, who, at the time, were responsible for approximately 1% of the gross domestic product of Germany. The further extent of the influence of the German Tobacco Industry towards manipulating opinion and knowledge to its favour was revealed in the 2006 analysis of the Tobacco Industry’s internal documents, which were released through litigation as a result of a 1998 legal settlement with the State of Minnesota, requiring that leading Tobacco Companies made their internal records public. The researchers found that the ‘German Association of Cigarette Industries’, or ‘VdC’, had made multiple, deliberate attempts to supress, dilute and control scientific research regarding Tobacco and its effects on Human Health.
The VdC directly funded 4 German professors, all of whom had favourable opinions, or performed favourable research, regarding Tobacco, as well as 110 research projects, involving over 60 scientists, during the period of 1977-1991; the VdC maintained complete control over these projects, including the design of the experiments and the right to publish the results, allowing the VdC to produce research that favoured the Tobacco Industry while avoiding the risk of the published research providing insights, which could be potentially harmful to the industry. The VdC would often publish research via a third party, usually a scientist whose connection to the industry could be hidden, in order to conceal the VdC’s influence on scientific research. In 1975, the VdC established, and provided extensive funding for, the ‘Research Council on Smoking and Health’, which was made and promoted as an independent organisation in order to make its findings more credible, but was still placed under the control of the Tobacco Industry, as the chairman of the council maintained the sole ability to give public statements, and the director of the VdC’s Scientific Department wrote the minutes of each of the meetings, controlling what was recorded, and held the position of the council’s ‘Scientific Secretary’; the council did not advertise for research proposals, but instead informed selected scientists about funding opportunities, allowing the council to select researchers, who would be more likely to publish favourable results. The VdC’s selective funding and support of research and individuals that discredited the role of Tobacco as a source of harm to Human Health, and promoted its benefits, served to dilute genuine studies and to introduce extreme bias into the evidence base, making it difficult for individuals and organisations to analyse the scientific evidence and develop truly informed opinions.
Some of the released documents revealed how the VdC intentionally supressed and withheld knowledge regarding the adverse health effects of Tobacco. The VdC kept data, regarding the co-carcinogenicity of nicotine, confidential and would, in its own words, “hide” some of its studies regarding tumours. In addition, when a study evidenced the harmfulness of passive smoking on animals, the earlier mentioned director of the VdC’s Scientific Department, again in the VdC’s own words, “guaranteed that the results of the study would not be published”. By manipulating and concealing scientific research, the VdC prevented knowledge, which would be used by individuals to make informed choices about their life-styles and opinions, from being fairly disseminated in order to prevent such knowledge from having adverse effects upon the Tobacco Industry.
Since the issues, which I have written about in this article, have been brought to the attention of Academia and the Public, some measures have been taken to mitigate their effects; for example, there has been a greater support for scientific research to be published freely, reducing the influence of the profit motive, and, therefore, the Publication Bias of academic publishers, and there has been a call by researchers for publishers to publish more negative, and otherwise ‘uninteresting’, results, alongside reproductions of previous research, in order to further minimise the Publication Bias and to promote the increased reliability of published research. These issues are extremely problematic as a vast multitude of individuals and organisations, including governing bodies, use the results of scientific research to form informed opinions, choices and decisions; when the results are unreliable or influenced by outside parties, it affects these opinions and decisions, potentially causing adverse results throughout all levels of Human society, whether it is an individual deciding whether or not to reduce his consumption of sucrose, or an international committee debating potential polices on Climate Change. I have attempted to demonstrate the role of Capitalism in these issues in order to promote people to think about how its systematic incentives encourage harmful practices in scientific research, and, possibly, develop solutions to mitigate and eliminate these incentives and issues. Despite my own political and economic opinions, I have made attempts to avoid disparagements of Capitalism, or to promote my own solutions to its systematic issues, in order to present ‘How Capitalism Hinders Science’, with a minimisation of my personal biases, so as to provide you, the reader, with reliable information regarding the issues that influence Science, and how the Capitalist system can be considered partly responsible for them . I hope that this article has provided you with an enjoyable read and, perhaps more importantly, information that will allow you to form better informed decisions and opinions! I welcome any criticisms or feedback in regards to this article, and give my sincerest of gratitude to you for taking the time to read it!
Sources and Resources.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profit_motive A ‘Wikipedia’ Article, providing a brief introduction to the Profit Motive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism A ‘Wikipedia’ Article regarding Capitalism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publish_or_perish A ‘Wikipedia’ Article, providing a brief insight into the process of ‘Publish or Perish’.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/sep/13/scientific-publishing-rip-off-taxpayers-fund-research A heavily opinionated Article that explains the process of Scientific Publishing. It is certainly biased, but I have included it as a resource as it provides a simple explanation as to how Scientific Publishers generate profit.
https://www.nature.com/news/1-500-scientists-lift-the-lid-on-reproducibility-1.19970 An article by the journal, ‘Nature’, regarding a study into the Replication Crisis.
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/349/6251/aac4716 An extensive Study that found significant problems with the estimated reproducibility of past research in the field of Psychology. http://science.sciencemag.org/content/351/6277/1037.2 A Criticism of the Study. https://www.thecut.com/2016/03/is-psychologys-replication-crisis-really-overblown.html An article addressing the major criticisms of this Study.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis A ‘Wikipedia’ Article regarding the Replication Crisis.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2017-11-02/why-statistical-significance-is-often-insignificant An Article regarding the over-exaggeration of statistical significance within the field of Science.
https://slate.com/technology/2016/10/why-the-replication-crisis-seems-worse-in-psychology.html An Article that provides possible explanation for the focus on the field of Psychology in the Replication Crisis.
https://explorable.com/data-dredging An Article on ‘Data Dredging.
https://xkcd.com/882/ A Comic providing an example of ‘P-Hacking’.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/article-abstract/2548255?widget=personalizedcontent&previousarticle=2548251 A Research Paper regarding the influence on the Sugar Industry on research of Coronary Heart Disease, and the adverse effects of sucrose consumption.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-climate-change-almost-40-years-ago/ An Article regarding the denial of awareness, and the spreading of misinformation, about Climate Change by ‘Exxon’.
http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa815f A Paper assessing the misleading of the Public by ‘ExxonMobil’.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1470431/ A Study of the Tobacco Industry’s influence on Science in Germany.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1497700/pdf/15842123.pdf A Report regarding the Tobacco Industry’s manipulation of research.
https://youtu.be/VcgO2v3JjCU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gx0fAjNHb1M https://youtu.be/2MDNvKXdLEM Three videos regarding the Replication Crisis, and other problems with reliability within different fields of scientific research.