Science Is Sometimes Unreal

Reflections on a recent case of scientific fraud

“OK, you got me.” Harvard’s dishonesty expert, Professor Francesca Gino

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Are you one of those people who signal enlightenment by displaying a SCIENCE IS REAL lawn sign? Then you haven’t been paying attention, friend.

There is science and then there are scientists—and the two are not synonymous. There’s an unspoken assumption that a scientific education elevates one to a higher level of human development, which is why, I believe, that progressives embrace Science. They want to be associated with an intellectual elite. Also, they believe that Science embodies a sort of moral code.

But none of this is true. Science qua science is amoral, judging nothing but the data, and an advanced degree in physics or sociology is not a patent of superior virtue. A Ph.D. doesn’t sweep away the imperfections, faults, and blemishes of human nature. To put it bluntly, scientists are no less likely than the rest of us to lie, cheat, steal, twist the facts, etc. In short, we can never be one hundred percent sure that SCIENCE IS REAL. All too often, it’s not.

Last week we learned that Professor Francesca Gino of the Harvard Business School, a recognized and much-cited expert on dishonesty and unethical behavior, has been busted for…dishonesty and unethical behavior. To the non-specialist eye, her research may seem intellectually rigorous. But other researchers attempting to replicate her results found that she was tweaking, twisting, or just plain fabricating her data. The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which published Gino’s article, “Signing at the beginning makes ethics salient and decreases dishonest self-reports in comparison to signing at the end,” felt compelled to retract it. Other retractions are pending and meanwhile, Harvard has placed Gino on administrative leave.

Francesca Gino’s ironical comeuppance may seem good for a laugh, but scientific fraud is no laughing matter. One notorious case was the 1998 publication by the British medical journal The Lancet of an article by Dr. Andrew Wakefield that purported to demonstrate a link between childhood autism and pediatric vaccines. Wakfield’s “study” was junk science, but the story took off like a rocket and caused a global panic. (One assiduous promoter of this lie was Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., today a candidate for the US presidency.) Many fearful parents declined to have their children vaccinated, with the result that diseases like measles and chicken pox, thought to have been stamped out, came creeping back. Not until 2011 was Wakefield’s article declared fraudulent and retracted. But by then the damage had been done, and to this day many people remain convinced that vaccines cause autism.

Nor is scientific fraud a rarity. In 2015, Richard Horton, Editor-in-Chief of The Lancet, wrote an article about the large and growing problem of fraud in the sciences. He noted that:

The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness. As one participant [in a symposium on the reproducibility and reliability of scientific research] put it, “poor methods get results.” (Emphasis added.)

You might think that much of this fraud goes on in the social sciences, where it’s easier to manipulate the data. And it’s certainly true that there have been some eye-popping examples of fakery in that quarter of academia. In 2011, a Dutch psychologist named Diederik Stapel was busted for multiple instances of academic fraud at three different universities over a ten-year period. Among his misdeeds was a published study analyzing racial stereotyping and the effects of advertisements on personal identity. In another published study, he claimed to show that the average person determined employment applicants to be more competent if they had a male voice. Both articles were later found to have been based on data that was either manipulated or just false. Ultimately, 58 of his published articles had to be retracted.

But there’s plenty of fraud to be found in the hard sciences as well, and while some of it is traceable to those usual suspects, ambition and greed, the influence of postmodern progressive ideology pays its part as well. Nor is it restricted to academia. One has only to recall the deceitful behavior of so-called public health experts during the pandemic, calibrating their public statements and spreading disinformation in an effort to manipulate the public. It may be recalled that after spending weeks and months preaching the absolute necessity of self-isolation, social distancing, masking and lockdowns, public health experts turned on a dime after the murder of George Floyd, declaring large crowds of protesters permissible because…racism is a public health threat.

No wonder Americans have lost their confidence in the probity of institutions and experts.

So those SCIENCE IS REAL lawn signs do not in fact reflect the enlightenment or superior intellect of those who post them. They’re simply professions of faith in the pronouncements of Science, or more accurately, in the pronouncements of scientists— who are, alas, no more virtuous than the rest of us.