There have been a lot of juicy headlines of late about behavioural science, including the one on Tim Harford’s Undercover Economist FT Magazine column “What’s behind the detective drama rocking academia” (Opinion, September 2).
Most have focused on the falsification of data and on the issue around “replications”, those studies that check whether older experimental results actually stand up.
But the questions I keep coming back to, as a practising behavioural scientist, are: how are our own behavioural “affects” influencing the way we see these headlines and might we not be misleading ourselves into thinking behavioural science isn’t all that it was made out to be?
Without understanding how deep the evidence base is for the field as a whole, “availability bias” can lead us to believe that the downfall of a few studies are representative of the vast research in the area. It’s easy (and a better story) to think they do.
Moreover, if we start to question the integrity of the field, we’re then more attuned to information that supports that state of belief (otherwise known as “confirmation bias”). There’s been a long tradition of poking fun at the rigour of the softer sciences — the absolutely necessary counterparts to the harder sciences. This is surely what’s lurking in some people’s minds. It offers a nice bit of substance to the denunciation sandwich.
Sarah Watters
Senior Consultant, Wellth
New York, NY, US