The Frenchman Auguste Comte is considered the "father of sociology." Comte coined the term "sociology" and developed positivism, proposing that the study of human society should follow the same scientific principles as the natural sciences.
Comte died in 1857, but his ideas dominated the social sciences, as they came to be known, for more than 100 years. Psychology, economics, anthropology, political science, and other social disciplines gained credibility with governments and leaders in business, law, and education, who relied on empirical research to guide public policy, organizational strategy, and social reform.
The key is "empirical research." This is a specific kind of research and refers to any study, inquiry, or investigation based on direct, observable, and measurable evidence rather than on theory, pure logic, or subjective belief.
Sadly, the very idea of empirical research today has been corrupted beyond measure.
“The incentive structure of modern science is such that a ‘simplify, then exaggerate’ strategy has become dominant, even if only tacitly,” according to a recent academic review. “To get published in leading journals, to be awarded grants and to be hired as a postdoc or faculty member, a system-wide bias for novelty, exaggeration and storytelling has emerged.”
Research is conducted not to find facts or the truth, but to buttress an argument, or aggrandize the researcher. Instead of relying on real-world data that can be seen, measured, recorded, or experienced, much research today relies on "novelty, exaggeration, and storytelling."
The result of this abandonment of scientific principles has been nothing short of catastrophic.
RealClearInvestigations reports there's an epidemic of poor quality academic and scientific research in recent years. "Hindawi, formerly a part of major science publisher Wiley, had to retract thousands of science articles, many of them alleged to have been produced by paper mills that generate reams of reports of studies that never existed," writes Christopher J. Ferguson of RealClearInvestigations (RCI).
While cases of outright fraud have received wide attention, a more subtle infection has spread within the research community: Research results that are inconsistent, based on poor methodologies, or are of limited practical impact are too often transformed into big, broad, but unreliable claims that, over time, reduce public confidence in science.
Several recent high-profile retractions of scientific papers highlight how broad scientific claims can be built upon questionable data. A recent paper asserted that banning sex work increases rapes. The sex work paper got significant attention on social media before skeptical scholars pointed out they couldn’t replicate the findings. In another major case, economists estimated that climate change would have a devastating economic toll on the world in a paper that was widely covered and influential in banking. However, it was ultimately retracted after other scholars alleged major errors.
In each case, science sleuths found that the dramatic claims did not reflect reality. While the number of retractions has soared over the past two decades to several thousand a year, according to the watchdog group Retraction Watch, experts believe only a small fraction of questionable work gets caught.
“The growing competition and ‘publish or perish’ culture in academia might conflict with the objectivity and integrity of research, because it forces scientists to produce ‘publishable’ results at all costs,” Daniele Fanelli, a meta-scientist at Heriot-Watt University and the London School of Economics, stated.
The sheer volume of papers that academics write using questionable methodology or achieving outright fraudulent findings has overwhelmed the system set up to police academia: peer review. "Peer reviewers are busy scholars who are mostly unpaid and stretched too thin, even with the help of emerging AI tools that have their own problems with accuracy," writes Ferguson.
One paper estimated that researchers worldwide spent over 100 million hours (closer to 130 million hours by some metrics) on peer review. This volume of labor breaks down to nearly 15,000 years of work annually that entirely volunteer academics conduct. If reviewers were paid, it would cost more than $2.3 billion just to review U.S., China, and UK papers.
In this blizzard of academic output, the only way to get noticed and achieve even short-lived notoriety is to play games with numbers and exaggerate the importance of findings.
A common type of research exaggeration stems from the promotion of “statistically significant” findings. The seriousness of the phrase may lead the public to interpret the findings as reliable and practically useful. But often that’s not the case. That’s because most social science and medical findings are very weak, so weak they might be produced by methodological flaws (or crud) in those studies. Scientists are nonetheless incentivized to highlight the supposed importance of statistically significant studies in order to get attention, even if they don’t warrant it.
What's to be done?
“I think that part of a useful cultural change would be towards a greater understanding and acceptance of the limitations of social science,” Fanelli wrote in an email to Ferguson. “Instead, a lot of it seems to have in some ways reinforced what was deemed the ‘cult of statistical significance,’ a mechanical and simplistic use of [statistical significance] as a paragon of validity.”
Indeed, Comte's positivism requires the same academic rigor found in biology, chemistry, or physics. Positivism asserts that truth can only be established through scientific methods, rejecting intuition, theology, metaphysics, or purely subjective speculation as valid sources of knowledge. Questions about abstract entities, ultimate purpose, underlying spiritual forces, or unobservable essences are considered scientifically meaningless or outside the realm of objective inquiry.
Catherine Knibbs, a psychotherapist and founder of Children and Tech in England, suggests that policymakers and politicians approach science to "prove" or buttress their position and appear incurious about data that doesn’t fit their agendas.
“To be honest I feel science is complex and whilst I love that about it, I [feel] quite alone in this,” Knibbs wrote in an email to Ferguson. “People are often skimming the stats and looking for [evidence that confirms their beliefs]. Not many people have time to slow down and use their slower cognizant processes. It’s why we have the chicken little sky is falling down s**t.”
Researchers and scientists who cater to that mindset thrive. The more apocalyptic the findings, the more attention the academic receives, and the more feted and enriched they are. One need only examine the climate change industrial complex to see this process in action. An academic publishes a paper that "proves" the Greenland glaciers will disappear in 10 years. Fact-checkers have repeatedly debunked as misleading or fabricated the claims in material such as viral "10-Year Challenge" social media graphics showing near-total ice disappearance over 10 years. But it's become gospel among climate change hysterics.
This is science in service to an agenda, not science in service to facts.
"Until the incentives for research change more broadly, the public will continue to be fed a steady diet of bold claims about human behavior built on an unsteady foundation, Ferguson writes. And the "social sciences," once acknowledged scientific disciplines, will regain the public's respect.
