Why trust science?

In the words of Neil deGrasse Tyson, the good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.

It’s a satisfying line, which for most of modern history, reflected something most of us genuinely believed. As a bullheaded teenager, I’d tout this quote in my religious studies class to argue against creationism and other concepts that I felt beggared belief. I trusted science fully. I knew that if there were untrue ideas in science, they’d eventually get plucked out as bad apples, like when hysteria was deleted from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1980.

But it’s not as easy as one might think to correct, or even spot, bad science. 

Science is underpinned by a few basic standards – including testability, predictability and replicability. Replicability in particular is thought of as the cornerstone of science. Essentially, scientists should be able to run the same experiment over and over and get the same result. But that isn’t happening as often as it should be.

In 2016, Nature surveyed more than 1,500 researchers and found that roughly 70% had tried and failed to reproduce someone else’s experiment. Concerningly, more than half failed to reproduce their own.This is the ‘replication crisis’ and impacts many fields, like biology, psychology, medicine and computer science.

So is this a few bad apples or a rotten core? To understand, we have to look at the world scientists actually live in.

Publish or perish 

The cogs of academia turn with publication. For scientists to keep their jobs, attract funding, and build a career, they need to get their work into journals, ideally prestigious ones. This is the culture of ‘publish or perish’ and it shapes how science is done.

Funding bodies and journal publishers tend to back work they consider novel or groundbreaking, which means that null results – experiments that found nothing, hypotheses that didn’t pan out – tend to fade into obscurity. A significant result is better for researchers and journals.

If the findings aren’t significant, though, researchers may collect more data after seeing early results, drop inconvenient outliers, or shift their methods toward whatever produces the most promising results. These practices inflate false positives, flooding journals with findings that look real but aren’t.

And when those findings fail to replicate, largely we don’t hear about it. Replication studies make up just 1% of published psychology literature. Many journals have explicit policies against publishing replication studies, allowing flawed theories to linger. Ioannidis, whose 2005 paper first sounded the alarm, estimated that most published research findings are false. 

This is the crisis – a science that can publish almost anything significant, but has no reliable way of taking it back.

So why trust it?

That we know about this, that it’s a public debate, and that the scientific institution is trying to fix it, points to a discipline capable of self-scrutiny. It’s a sign of transparency, a mark of trust. From the comment section on Reddit: “we know, we’re working on it, it’s difficult”. 

“Awareness about the replication crisis appears to be promoting better behavior among scientists,” writes Eric Loken, Assistant Professor of Educational Psychology at University of Connecticut.

“The stakes have been raised for researchers. They know that there’s the possibility that their study might be reviewed by thousands of opinionated commenters on the internet or by a high-profile group like the Reproducibility Project. 

“Some journals now require scientists to make their data and computer code available, which makes it likelier that others will catch errors in their work.”

Researchers are now pushing for preregistration to lock in methods before data collection begins, so results can’t be manipulated later. Open data sharing is gaining ground. Even journals and funding bodies are slowly starting to change, recognising the value of replication studies in holding science to account. Some have called this period not a crisis but a revolution, a credibility reckoning that was long overdue – pushing science to be better than it was.

It might be blasphemous coming from a philosophy graduate, but science remains the best method we have for understanding the world. At a time when trust in science is eroding, we have to protect its trustworthiness. I know deGrasse Tyson wouldn’t ask, but I still believe in it.