The Biases of Scientists and News Reporters

As mentioned previously, everyone has biases. The trick to compensating for them is to know what they are. Individual news reporters and scientists each have their own biases, which can vary all over the place. However, as a group, both of these categories seem to have a common weakness: they want to announce something new.

For news sources, this is obvious. Being the first to have a “scoop” gains the source prestige and more readers/viewers. (Everybody wants to be the first in the know. It also gives them status around the water cooler at work). This is also true for scientists: fame (and often fortune) come from being the first to discover something new.

Since we are all influenced by our emotions (whether we admit it or not), this desire to find something new makes us less inclined to check our results before we announce our great discovery to the world, especially when we think the competition is breathing down our necks. Remember 60 Minutes exposé of President Bush’s National Guard service and all the controversy that followed. Apparently, the people involved honestly believed they had valid information, but did not check things carefully before rushing to get the story out: they were worried about the competition publishing first (article).

The same sort of thing occurred in cold fusion. The public announcement by Pons and Fleischmann (instead of going through a refereed journal was done mainly to get ahead of Steven Jones (see Wikipedia article). These people also believed they had something good, but did not check things carefully enough.

These two examples show another similarity between science and journalism: they both tend to be self-correcting. When one scientist or journalist presents something incorrect or questionable, a competitor is quick to point out the mistakes. In both cases competition for status provides the checking and correcting needed to stay in touch with reality. No external correction seems needed. The question is why this does not occur in other disciplines. Politics, in particular, seems like it should be self-correcting (with the competing parties), but we see that obvious mistakes can continue uncorrected for years. Perhaps this is because the only time real correction can occur is at elections, which are years apart. Perhaps some faster form of corrective feedback is needed here. Or perhaps it is because there is too much attention to perceptions rather than reality that keeps mistakes from getting fixed.
An interesting side effect of this desire by scientists to come up with new ideas to replace old ones is that it demonstrates the robustness of ideas which withstand these attacks. When something like the Theory of Evolution remains little changed after generations of scientists who would love the fame that would come from being the one to present a better answer shows just how difficult coming up with a better answer is.