How the public, and scientists, perceive advancement of knowledge from conflicting study results

Abstract

Science often advances through disagreement among scientists and the studies they produce. For members of the public, however, conflicting results from scientific studies may trigger a sense of uncertainty that in turn leads to a feeling that nothing new has been learned from those studies. In several scenario studies, participants read about pairs of highly similar scientific studies with results that either agreed or disagreed, and were asked, “When we take the results of these two studies together, do we now know more, less, or the same as we did before about (the study topic)?” We find that over half of participants do not feel that “we know more” as the result of the two new studies when the second study fails to replicate the first. When the two study results strongly conflict (e.g., one finds a positive and the other a negative association between two variables), a non-trivial proportion of participants actually say that “we know less” than we did before. Such a sentiment arguably violates normative principles of statistical and scientific inference positing that new study findings can never reduce our level of knowledge (and that only completely uninformative studies can leave our level of knowledge unchanged). Drawing attention to possible moderating variables, or to sample size considerations, did not influence people’s perceptions of knowledge advancement. Scientist members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, when presented with the same scenarios, were less inclined to say that nothing new is learned from conflicting study results.

Keywords

• knowledge
• science
• inference
• conflicting results