Thread by @casappenfield

Hey #psychtwitter! I stumbled across this post and it struck me as too important not to share. A 🧵 + some thoughts on scientific integrity (by @luulapants on tumblr):

“In middle school biology, we did an experiment. We were given yams, which we would sprout in cups of water. We then had to make hypotheses about how the yams would grow, based on descriptions of yam plants in our books, and make notes of our observations as they grew.
Here’s

what was supposed to happen: we were supposed to see that the actual growth of the plant did not resemble our hypotheses. We were then supposed to figure out that these were, in fact, sweet potatoes. What actually happened was that every single student in every single class lied

in their notes so that their observations perfectly matched their hypotheses. See, everyone assumed the mismatch meant they had done something wrong in the process of growing the plant or that they had misunderstood the dichotomous key or the plant identification terminology.

And, thanks to the wonders of a public school education, everyone assumed the wrong results would get us a failing grade. We were trying to pass. We didn’t want to get b*****d out by the teacher. Curiosity, learning, science - that had nothing to do with why we were sitting in

that classroom. So we all lied. The teacher was furious. She tried to fail every student, but the administration stepped in and told her she wasn’t allowed to because a 100% fail rate is recognized as a failure of the teacher, not the class. It wasn’t even her fault, really,

though her being a notorious hard-a** didn’t help. It was a failure of the entire educational system. So whenever I see crap like Elizabeth Holmes’s blood test scam or pharmaceutical trials which are unable to be replicated or industry-funded research that reaches wildly

unscientific conclusions, I just remember those f****** sweet potatoes. I remember that curiosity dies when people are just trying to give their superiors the “right” answers, so they can get the grade, get the job, get the paycheck. It’s not about truth when it’s about paying

rent. There’s no scientific integrity if you can’t control for human desperation.”

I was just talking to a colleague about how research can be bottlenecked by the need to align study aims (and results) to the desires of the respective funding agency. Equating research with “truth” is a tricky thing, especially if there is an agenda behind it. (I highly

recommend The Mismeasure of Man if you want to know more about the desperation to scientifically justify racism using biological determinism, for example). In the words of Gould, “Science must be understood as a social phenomenon, a gutsy, human enterprise, not the work of robots

programmed to collect pure information.” Just some Monday evening thoughts…