Manufacturer-Funded Research Compromises Patient Care

How interesting to see Forbes run a story on the way Big Pharma is manipulating research to support their drugs, but every effort to expose this dangerous and possibly criminal behavior on the part of these mega-companies is welcome.

How Manufacturer-Funded Research Compromises Patient Care

Robert Pearl, M.D.
7/24/2014
To improve patient care, doctors rely on research and published information.

According to an American Medical News report, professional journals are still the most popular source of up-to-date medical information among doctors.

These medical publications inform physicians on new drugs and treatments, and they contain peer-reviewed studies that both physicians and patients assume are scientifically accurate.

But all too often, research findings aren’t as scientific as they should be. And some are flat-out biased.

Research Studies Confirm Bias In Research

In 2012, the report “Industry sponsorship and research outcome” concluded that studies sponsored by a drug or device company lead to “more favorable results and conclusions” about the products studied than independently sponsored ones.

And a recent study from the Harvard Medical School on plastic surgery outcomes concluded, “Studies authored by groups with conflicts of interest are significantly associated with reporting lower surgical complications and therefore describing positive research findings.”

This was especially true when manufacturer-marketed products were used in the study, according to the study’s abstract.

Perhaps the most damning study comes by way of the National Center for Biotechnology Information.

In it, the authors identified 24 peer-reviewed studies published in highly respected medical journals. Each study compared two different types of suction devices that help wounds heal faster.

One device uses a sponge-type material while the other relies on a gauze-wound interface.

The researchers asked five independent surgeons to read all 24 papers and determine which product was judged as better in each study.

The conclusion: Seven papers seemed to favor the first treatment, 15 favored the second and 2 didn’t reach a definitive judgment.

Now, Here’s The Kicker

Of the 24 studies, 19 were funded by a manufacturer of one of the two devices. Lo and behold, based on determinations made by the independent surgeons, 18 of those 19 papers recommended the product made by the manufacturer who funded the research. Just one manufacturer-funded study was deemed to have a neutral conclusion.

Research advances medicine but conflicts of interest can corrupt outcomes and compromise patient care. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

From a statistical perspective, this is nearly an impossible outcome.

Flip a coin 19 times and there’s a 1 in 524,288 chance it comes up heads each time.

We might expect that if the two alternative products were relatively equivalent and the research truly unbiased, the product sold by the non-funding company should come out on top about half the time. To have no study go against the funding company yields nearly impossible odds.

And if they are not equivalent, the better product should be identified in nearly all studies, regardless of the source of the researcher’s funding.

There is no way to interpret these results, except to assume the researchers themselves were biased based on who paid for their work.

Biased outcomes like these would raise red flags in any other context. They would have signaled some sort of inappropriate influence. The scientific results would have been rejected by medical journals.

But not under these circumstances.

How Bias Gets By In Medical Research

No manufacturer is foolish enough to demand that investigators reach a specific conclusion in their research. Discovery of such a quid pro quo relationship could result in a major scandal for the company and the termination of the researchers.

The origin of bias in these manufacturer-funded studies may be subconscious, but no less effective.

Researchers and research sponsors interact at events and meetings during the time the work itself is being performance and during subsequent clinical trials.

And social science literature has clearly demonstrated people have a strong desire to reciprocate a gift.

At a minimum, grateful researchers unconsciously want to “return the favor” to their funding organizations.

And given the constant pressure in academia to “publish or perish,” this bias could be more overt as researchers fear losing funding – even if a threat is never explicitly conveyed.

Regardless of the etiology, research bias and skewed results are real when medical companies fund studies on their products. And whether it’s conscious or unconscious, bias is inappropriate in any scientific context.

Curbing Bias In Medical Research
Over the past decades, attempts have been made to limit the inappropriate influence of bias in research.

Today, authors of peer-reviewed articles and presenters at accredited meetings are required to disclose any personal financial benefit from the research. They must also disclose financial dealings with the manufacturer – but not any of the details.

Researchers receiving federally funded grants must register their trials on clinicaltrials.gov and publish their results even when findings don’t favor the funding organization.

The days of sponsors suppressing unfavorable outcomes or helping investigators write their papers before submission are largely behind us.

But as the data demonstrate, today’s system is far from effective at ensuring scientific integrity.

The Negative Consequences of Manufacturer-Funded Research

Physicians rely on published data to determine the best treatment for their patients. When it is contaminated by inappropriate influence, doctors can’t provide the best possible care.

As a result, patients end up with lower quality care, increased complications and higher costs.

Public and private entities could take a number of big steps to curb medical research bias.

For starters, peer-reviewed journals could refuse to publish articles funded by a single company.

If manufacturers wanted to advance medical knowledge, competing drug and device companies could contribute to a common, independent research fund for their particular industry. This would eliminate the manufacturer-researcher relationship from a study’s equation.

Alternatively, a small fee could be added to the sales price of medical devices and drugs to fund independent research. Organizations like the National Institute of Health (NIH) could oversee the distribution of these dollars.

Of course, we should expect manufacturers to resist such changes. After all, drug and device companies aspire to drive product sales, not produce unbiased research.

But the problems created by the current system are far too serious to accept the status quo.

We need to stop hiding our heads in the sand. The data is clear. Change is essential.

~ Dr. Robert Pearl is the CEO of The Permanente Medical Group, a certified plastic and reconstructive surgeon, and Stanford University professor. Follow him on Twitter: @RobertPearlMD.

Paul Bloom - Can Prejudice Ever Be a Good Thing?

In the TED Talk from the beginning of 2014, Paul Bloom talks about prejudice, based on his then new book, Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil (Nov. 2013).

Can prejudice ever be a good thing?

TEDSalon NY2014 · 16:23 · Filmed Jan 2014


We often think of bias and prejudice as rooted in ignorance. But as psychologist Paul Bloom seeks to show, prejudice is often natural, rational ... even moral. The key, says Bloom, is to understand how our own biases work — so we can take control when they go wrong.

* * * * *

Paul Bloom explores some of the most puzzling aspects of human nature, including pleasure, religion, and morality.

Why you should listen

In Paul Bloom’s last book, How Pleasure Works, he explores the often-mysterious enjoyment that people get out of experiences such as sex, food, art, and stories. His latest book, Just Babies, examines the nature and origins of good and evil. How do we decide what's fair and unfair? What is the relationship between emotion and rationality in our judgments of right and wrong? And how much of morality is present at birth? To answer these questions, he and his colleagues at Yale study how babies make moral decisions. (How do you present a moral quandary to a 6-month-old? Through simple, gamelike experiments that yield surprisingly adult-like results.)   

Paul Bloom is a passionate teacher of undergraduates, and his popular Introduction to Psychology 110 class has been released to the world through the Open Yale Courses program. He has recently completed a second MOOC, “Moralities of Everyday Life”, that introduced moral psychology to tens of thousands of students. And he also presents his research to a popular audience though articles in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. Many of the projects he works on are student-initiated, and all of them, he notes, are "strongly interdisciplinary, bringing in theory and research from areas such as cognitive, social, and developmental psychology, evolutionary theory, linguistics, theology and philosophy."  

He says: "A growing body of evidence suggests that humans do have a rudimentary moral sense from the very start of life."

What others say

"Bloom is after something deeper than the mere stuff of feeling good. He analyzes how our minds have evolved certain cognitive tricks that help us negotiate the physical and social world." — New York Times

Bookforum Omnivore: Psychology and Its Discontents

From August 9th, this collection of articles was featured in Bookforum's Omnivore blog. There are some good pieces, especially the Allen Frances article on the pathologizing of human emotions.

Psychology and its discontents

Aug 9 2012
11:00AM

• A new issue of The New School Psychology Bulletin is out.
• The paradox of popular psychology: Samuel McNerney on the irrationality of irrationality. 
• From Arena, John Cash on obedience to authority and its discontents. 
• Psychology and its discontents: We see an area in the brain “light up” when we think about a topic, and assume we know something about thought — but what, exactly? 
• Decisions, decisions: Why humans can’t seem to make the “right” choices. 
• Are people probabilistically challenged? Alex Stein reviews Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow. 
• Are we systematically biases against changing the status quo? Nick Bostrom discusses this tendency and its implications when it comes to making decisions about cognitive enhancement. 
• Is crazy the new normal? We are at risk of turning everyday struggles into illnesses, according to prominent U.S. psychiatrist, Allen Frances. 
• George Miller, who wrote the almost-magical essay “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two”, dies.

Time Magazine: The Optimism Bias by Tali Sharot

Interesting . . . . This article is based on Tali Sharot's new book, The Optimism Bias: A Tour of the Irrationally Positive Brain (June 14, 2011, release date).

The Optimism Bias

By Tali Sharot Saturday, May 28, 2011

We like to think of ourselves as rational creatures. We watch our backs, weigh the odds, pack an umbrella. But both neuroscience and social science suggest that we are more optimistic than realistic. On average, we expect things to turn out better than they wind up being. People hugely underestimate their chances of getting divorced, losing their job or being diagnosed with cancer; expect their children to be extraordinarily gifted; envision themselves achieving more than their peers; and overestimate their likely life span (sometimes by 20 years or more).

The belief that the future will be much better than the past and present is known as the optimism bias. It abides in every race, region and socioeconomic bracket. Schoolchildren playing when-I-grow-up are rampant optimists, but so are grownups: a 2005 study found that adults over 60 are just as likely to see the glass half full as young adults.

You might expect optimism to erode under the tide of news about violent conflicts, high unemployment, tornadoes and floods and all the threats and failures that shape human life. Collectively we can grow pessimistic — about the direction of our country or the ability of our leaders to improve education and reduce crime. But private optimism, about our personal future, remains incredibly resilient. A survey conducted in 2007 found that while 70% thought families in general were less successful than in their parents' day, 76% of respondents were optimistic about the future of their own family.

(See "The Case for Optimism" in TIME's special: 10 Ideas That Will Change the World.)

Overly positive assumptions can lead to disastrous miscalculations — make us less likely to get health checkups, apply sunscreen or open a savings account, and more likely to bet the farm on a bad investment. But the bias also protects and inspires us: it keeps us moving forward rather than to the nearest high-rise ledge. Without optimism, our ancestors might never have ventured far from their tribes and we might all be cave dwellers, still huddled together and dreaming of light and heat.

To make progress, we need to be able to imagine alternative realities — better ones — and we need to believe that we can achieve them. Such faith helps motivate us to pursue our goals. Optimists in general work longer hours and tend to earn more. Economists at Duke University found that optimists even save more. And although they are not less likely to divorce, they are more likely to remarry — an act that is, as Samuel Johnson wrote, the triumph of hope over experience.

(See if the global "happiness" index will ever beat out the GDP.)

Even if that better future is often an illusion, optimism has clear benefits in the present. Hope keeps our minds at ease, lowers stress and improves physical health. Researchers studying heart-disease patients found that optimists were more likely than nonoptimistic patients to take vitamins, eat low-fat diets and exercise, thereby reducing their overall coronary risk. A study of cancer patients revealed that pessimistic patients under the age of 60 were more likely to die within eight months than nonpessimistic patients of the same initial health, status and age.

In fact, a growing body of scientific evidence points to the conclusion that optimism may be hardwired by evolution into the human brain. The science of optimism, once scorned as an intellectually suspect province of pep rallies and smiley faces, is opening a new window on the workings of human consciousness. What it shows could fuel a revolution in psychology, as the field comes to grips with accumulating evidence that our brains aren't just stamped by the past. They are constantly being shaped by the future.

See TIME's special report "How to Live 100 Years."

Hardwired for Hope?
I would have liked to tell you that my work on optimism grew out of a keen interest in the positive side of human nature. The reality is that I stumbled onto the brain's innate optimism by accident. After living through Sept. 11, 2001, in New York City, I had set out to investigate people's memories of the terrorist attacks. I was intrigued by the fact that people felt their memories were as accurate as a videotape, while often they were filled with errors. A survey conducted around the country showed that 11 months after the attacks, individuals' recollections of their experience that day were consistent with their initial accounts (given in September 2011) only 63% of the time. They were also poor at remembering details of the event, such as the names of the airline carriers. Where did these mistakes in memory come from?

Scientists who study memory proposed an intriguing answer: memories are susceptible to inaccuracies partly because the neural system responsible for remembering episodes from our past might not have evolved for memory alone. Rather, the core function of the memory system could in fact be to imagine the future — to enable us to prepare for what has yet to come. The system is not designed to perfectly replay past events, the researchers claimed. It is designed to flexibly construct future scenarios in our minds. As a result, memory also ends up being a reconstructive process, and occasionally, details are deleted and others inserted.

(See why happiness isn't always good.)

To test this, I decided to record the brain activity of volunteers while they imagined future events — not events on the scale of 9/11, but events in their everyday lives — and compare those results with the pattern I observed when the same individuals recalled past events. But something unexpected occurred. Once people started imagining the future, even the most banal life events seemed to take a dramatic turn for the better. Mundane scenes brightened with upbeat details as if polished by a Hollywood script doctor. You might think that imagining a future haircut would be pretty dull. Not at all. Here is what one of my participants pictured: "I was getting my hair cut to donate to Locks of Love [a charity that fashions wigs for young cancer patients]. It had taken me years to grow it out, and my friends were all there to help celebrate. We went to my favorite hair place in Brooklyn and then went to lunch at our favorite restaurant."

I asked another participant to imagine a plane ride. "I imagined the takeoff — my favorite! — and then the eight-hour-long nap in between and then finally landing in Krakow and clapping for the pilot for providing the safe voyage," she responded. No tarmac delays, no screaming babies. The world, only a year or two into the future, was a wonderful place to live in.

If all our participants insisted on thinking positively when it came to what lay in store for them personally, what does that tell us about how our brains are wired? Is the human tendency for optimism a consequence of the architecture of our brains?

(See the new science of happiness.)

The Human Time Machine
To think positively about our prospects, we must first be able to imagine ourselves in the future. Optimism starts with what may be the most extraordinary of human talents: mental time travel, the ability to move back and forth through time and space in one's mind. Although most of us take this ability for granted, our capacity to envision a different time and place is in fact critical to our survival.

It is easy to see why cognitive time travel was naturally selected for over the course of evolution. It allows us to plan ahead, to save food and resources for times of scarcity and to endure hard work in anticipation of a future reward. It also lets us forecast how our current behavior may influence future generations. If we were not able to picture the world in a hundred years or more, would we be concerned with global warming? Would we attempt to live healthily? Would we have children?

While mental time travel has clear survival advantages, conscious foresight came to humans at an enormous price — the understanding that somewhere in the future, death awaits. Ajit Varki, a biologist at the University of California, San Diego, argues that the awareness of mortality on its own would have led evolution to a dead end. The despair would have interfered with our daily function, bringing the activities needed for survival to a stop. The only way conscious mental time travel could have arisen over the course of evolution is if it emerged together with irrational optimism. Knowledge of death had to emerge side by side with the persistent ability to picture a bright future.

See the world's most influential people in the 2010 TIME 100.

The capacity to envision the future relies partly on the hippocampus, a brain structure that is crucial to memory. Patients with damage to their hippocampus are unable to recollect the past, but they are also unable to construct detailed images of future scenarios. They appear to be stuck in time. The rest of us constantly move back and forth in time; we might think of a conversation we had with our spouse yesterday and then immediately of our dinner plans for later tonight.

But the brain doesn't travel in time in a random fashion. It tends to engage in specific types of thoughts. We consider how well our kids will do in life, how we will obtain that sought-after job, afford that house on the hill and find perfect love. We imagine our team winning the crucial game, look forward to an enjoyable night on the town or picture a winning streak at the blackjack table. We also worry about losing loved ones, failing at our job or dying in a terrible plane crash — but research shows that most of us spend less time mulling over negative outcomes than we do over positive ones. When we do contemplate defeat and heartache, we tend to focus on how these can be avoided.

(See 20 ways to get and stay happy.)

Findings from a study I conducted a few years ago with prominent neuroscientist Elizabeth Phelps suggest that directing our thoughts of the future toward the positive is a result of our frontal cortex's communicating with subcortical regions deep in our brain. The frontal cortex, a large area behind the forehead, is the most recently evolved part of the brain. It is larger in humans than in other primates and is critical for many complex human functions such as language and goal setting.

Using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner, we recorded brain activity in volunteers as they imagined specific events that might occur to them in the future. Some of the events that I asked them to imagine were desirable (a great date or winning a large sum of money), and some were undesirable (losing a wallet, ending a romantic relationship). The volunteers reported that their images of sought-after events were richer and more vivid than those of unwanted events.

This matched the enhanced activity we observed in two critical regions of the brain: the amygdala, a small structure deep in the brain that is central to the processing of emotion, and the rostral anterior cingulate cortex (rACC), an area of the frontal cortex that modulates emotion and motivation. The rACC acts like a traffic conductor, enhancing the flow of positive emotions and associations. The more optimistic a person was, the higher the activity in these regions was while imagining positive future events (relative to negative ones) and the stronger the connectivity between the two structures.

(See "Do We need $75,000 a Year to Be Happy?")

The findings were particularly fascinating because these precise regions — the amygdala and the rACC — show abnormal activity in depressed individuals. While healthy people expect the future to be slightly better than it ends up being, people with severe depression tend to be pessimistically biased: they expect things to be worse than they end up being. People with mild depression are relatively accurate when predicting future events. They see the world as it is. In other words, in the absence of a neural mechanism that generates unrealistic optimism, it is possible all humans would be mildly depressed.

Can Optimism Change Reality?
The problem with pessimistic expectations, such as those of the clinically depressed, is that they have the power to alter the future; negative expectations shape outcomes in a negative way. How do expectations change reality?

See how negative thinking affects your health.

To answer this question, my colleague, cognitive neuroscientist Sara Bengtsson, devised an experiment in which she manipulated positive and negative expectations of students while their brains were scanned and tested their performance on cognitive tasks. To induce expectations of success, she primed college students with words such as smart, intelligent and clever just before asking them to perform a test. To induce expectations of failure, she primed them with words like stupid and ignorant. The students performed better after being primed with an affirmative message.

Examining the brain-imaging data, Bengtsson found that the students' brains responded differently to the mistakes they made depending on whether they were primed with the word clever or the word stupid. When the mistake followed positive words, she observed enhanced activity in the anterior medial part of the prefrontal cortex (a region that is involved in self-reflection and recollection). However, when the participants were primed with the word stupid, there was no heightened activity after a wrong answer. It appears that after being primed with the word stupid, the brain expected to do poorly and did not show signs of surprise or conflict when it made an error.

(See how playing the part of an optimist can help your health.)

A brain that doesn't expect good results lacks a signal telling it, "Take notice — wrong answer!" These brains will fail to learn from their mistakes and are less likely to improve over time. Expectations become self-fulfilling by altering our performance and actions, which ultimately affects what happens in the future. Often, however, expectations simply transform the way we perceive the world without altering reality itself. Let me give you an example. While writing these lines, my friend calls. He is at Heathrow Airport waiting to get on a plane to Austria for a skiing holiday. His plane has been delayed for three hours already, because of snowstorms at his destination. "I guess this is both a good and bad thing," he says. Waiting at the airport is not pleasant, but he quickly concludes that snow today means better skiing conditions tomorrow. His brain works to match the unexpected misfortune of being stuck at the airport to its eager anticipation of a fun getaway.

A canceled flight is hardly tragic, but even when the incidents that befall us are the type of horrific events we never expected to encounter, we automatically seek evidence confirming that our misfortune is a blessing in disguise. No, we did not anticipate losing our job, being ill or getting a divorce, but when these incidents occur, we search for the upside. These experiences mature us, we think. They may lead to more fulfilling jobs and stable relationships in the future. Interpreting a misfortune in this way allows us to conclude that our sunny expectations were correct after all — things did work out for the best.

Silver Linings
How do we find the silver lining in storm clouds? To answer that, my colleagues — renowned neuroscientist Ray Dolan and neurologist Tamara Shiner — and I instructed volunteers in the fMRI scanner to visualize a range of medical conditions, from broken bones to Alzheimer's, and rate how bad they imagined these conditions to be. Then we asked them: If you had to endure one of the following, which would you rather have — a broken leg or a broken arm? Heartburn or asthma? Finally, they rated all the conditions again. Minutes after choosing one particular illness out of many, the volunteers suddenly found that the chosen illness was less intimidating. A broken leg, for example, may have been thought of as "terrible" before choosing it over some other malady. However, after choosing it, the subject would find a silver lining: "With a broken leg, I will be able to lie in bed watching TV, guilt-free."

(See how self-help can stop negative thoughts.)

In our study, we also found that people perceived adverse events more positively if they had experienced them in the past. Recording brain activity while these reappraisals took place revealed that highlighting the positive within the negative involves, once again, a tête-à-tête between the frontal cortex and subcortical regions processing emotional value. While contemplating a mishap, like a broken leg, activity in the rACC modulated signals in a region called the striatum that conveyed the good and bad of the event in question — biasing activity in a positive direction.

It seems that our brain possesses the philosopher's stone that enables us to turn lead into gold and helps us bounce back to normal levels of well-being. It is wired to place high value on the events we encounter and put faith in its own decisions. This is true not only when forced to choose between two adverse options (such as selecting between two courses of medical treatment) but also when we are selecting between desirable alternatives. Imagine you need to pick between two equally attractive job offers. Making a decision may be a tiring, difficult ordeal, but once you make up your mind, something miraculous happens. Suddenly — if you are like most people — you view the chosen offer as better than you did before and conclude that the other option was not that great after all. According to social psychologist Leon Festinger, we re-evaluate the options postchoice to reduce the tension that arises from making a difficult decision between equally desirable options.

See how to prevent illness at any age.

In a brain-imaging study I conducted with Ray Dolan and Benedetto De Martino in 2009, we asked subjects to imagine going on vacation to 80 different destinations and rate how happy they thought they would be in each place. We then asked them to select one destination from two choices that they had rated exactly the same. Would you choose Paris over Brazil? Finally, we asked them to imagine and rate all the destinations again. Seconds after picking between two destinations, people rated their selected destination higher than before and rated the discarded choice lower than before.

The brain-imaging data revealed that these changes were happening in the caudate nucleus, a cluster of nerve cells that is part of the striatum. The caudate has been shown to process rewards and signal their expectation. If we believe we are about to be given a paycheck or eat a scrumptious chocolate cake, the caudate acts as an announcer broadcasting to other parts of the brain, "Be ready for something good." After we receive the reward, the value is quickly updated. If there is a bonus in the paycheck, this higher value will be reflected in striatal activity. If the cake is disappointing, the decreased value will be tracked so that next time our expectations will be lower.

In our experiment, after a decision was made between two destinations, the caudate nucleus rapidly updated its signal. Before choosing, it might signal "thinking of something great" while imagining both Greece and Thailand. But after choosing Greece, it now broadcast "thinking of something remarkable!" for Greece and merely "thinking of something good" for Thailand.

(See pictures of couples in love.)

True, sometimes we regret our decisions; our choices can turn out to be disappointing. But on balance, when you make a decision — even if it is a hypothetical choice — you will value it more and expect it to bring you pleasure.

This affirmation of our decisions helps us derive heightened pleasure from choices that might actually be neutral. Without this, our lives might well be filled with second-guessing. Have we done the right thing? Should we change our mind? We would find ourselves stuck, overcome by indecision and unable to move forward.

The Puzzle of Optimism
While the past few years have seen important advances in the neuroscience of optimism, one enduring puzzle remained. How is it that people maintain this rosy bias even when information challenging our upbeat forecasts is so readily available? Only recently have we been able to decipher this mystery, by scanning the brains of people as they process both positive and negative information about the future. The findings are striking: when people learn, their neurons faithfully encode desirable information that can enhance optimism but fail at incorporating unexpectedly undesirable information. When we hear a success story like Mark Zuckerberg's, our brains take note of the possibility that we too may become immensely rich one day. But hearing that the odds of divorce are almost 1 in 2 tends not to make us think that our own marriages may be destined to fail. (See "A Primer for Pessimists.")

Why would our brains be wired in this way? It is tempting to speculate that optimism was selected by evolution precisely because, on balance, positive expectations enhance the odds of survival. Research findings that optimists live longer and are healthier, plus the fact that most humans display optimistic biases — and emerging data that optimism is linked to specific genes — all strongly support this hypothesis. Yet optimism is also irrational and can lead to unwanted outcomes. The question then is, How can we remain hopeful — benefiting from the fruits of optimism — while at the same time guarding ourselves from its pitfalls?

I believe knowledge is key. We are not born with an innate understanding of our biases. The brain's illusions have to be identified by careful scientific observation and controlled experiments and then communicated to the rest of us. Once we are made aware of our optimistic illusions, we can act to protect ourselves. The good news is that awareness rarely shatters the illusion. The glass remains half full. It is possible, then, to strike a balance, to believe we will stay healthy, but get medical insurance anyway; to be certain the sun will shine, but grab an umbrella on our way out — just in case.

Adapted from The Optimism Bias, by Tali Sharot. Copyright © 2011 Tali Sharot. Reprinted with permission of Pantheon Books, a division of Random House Inc. All rights reserved

Sharot is a research fellow at University College London's Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging

See the perils of positive thinking.

Tags: Psychology, bias, optimism, positivity, brain, evolution, hard-wired, Time Magazine, The Optimism Bias, Tali Sharot, books, consciousness, the Irrationally Positive Brain, rational, irrational, perspectives, imagination, hope

Jonathan Haidt on Political Bias in the Social Sciences

I heard this interview yesterday on NPR - Neal Conan spoke with psychologist Jonathan Haidt on political bias in the social sciences. The conversation was sparked by a recent article in the New York Times by John Tierney that reported on a talk Haidt had given at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.

Haidt's use of the term "tribal" to describe the opposing worldviews is very accurate - it's an us-versus-them mentality that is very tribal in its origins. You can find more responses to the talk at Haidt's page.

Here is the New York Times article - below this is the NPR interview with Haidt.

Social Scientist Sees Bias Within

By JOHN TIERNEY

Published: February 7, 2011

SAN ANTONIO — Some of the world’s pre-eminent experts on bias discovered an unexpected form of it at their annual meeting.

Discrimination is always high on the agenda at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology’s conference, where psychologists discuss their research on racial prejudice, homophobia, sexism, stereotype threat and unconscious bias against minorities. But the most talked-about speech at this year’s meeting, which ended Jan. 30, involved a new “outgroup.”

It was identified by Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia who studies the intuitive foundations of morality and ideology. He polled his audience at the San Antonio Convention Center, starting by asking how many considered themselves politically liberal. A sea of hands appeared, and Dr. Haidt estimated that liberals made up 80 percent of the 1,000 psychologists in the ballroom. When he asked for centrists and libertarians, he spotted fewer than three dozen hands. And then, when he asked for conservatives, he counted a grand total of three.

“This is a statistically impossible lack of diversity,” Dr. Haidt concluded, noting polls showing that 40 percent of Americans are conservative and 20 percent are liberal. In his speech and in an interview, Dr. Haidt argued that social psychologists are a “tribal-moral community” united by “sacred values” that hinder research and damage their credibility — and blind them to the hostile climate they’ve created for non-liberals.

“Anywhere in the world that social psychologists see women or minorities underrepresented by a factor of two or three, our minds jump to discrimination as the explanation,” said Dr. Haidt, who called himself a longtime liberal turned centrist. “But when we find out that conservatives are underrepresented among us by a factor of more than 100, suddenly everyone finds it quite easy to generate alternate explanations.”

Dr. Haidt (pronounced height) told the audience that he had been corresponding with a couple of non-liberal graduate students in social psychology whose experiences reminded him of closeted gay students in the 1980s. He quoted — anonymously — from their e-mails describing how they hid their feelings when colleagues made political small talk and jokes predicated on the assumption that everyone was a liberal.

“I consider myself very middle-of-the-road politically: a social liberal but fiscal conservative. Nonetheless, I avoid the topic of politics around work,” one student wrote. “Given what I’ve read of the literature, I am certain any research I conducted in political psychology would provide contrary findings and, therefore, go unpublished. Although I think I could make a substantial contribution to the knowledge base, and would be excited to do so, I will not.”

The politics of the professoriate has been studied by the economists Christopher Cardiff and Daniel Klein and the sociologists Neil Gross and Solon Simmons. They’ve independently found that Democrats typically outnumber Republicans at elite universities by at least six to one among the general faculty, and by higher ratios in the humanities and social sciences. In a 2007 study of both elite and non-elite universities, Dr. Gross and Dr. Simmons reported that nearly 80 percent of psychology professors are Democrats, outnumbering Republicans by nearly 12 to 1.

The fields of psychology, sociology and anthropology have long attracted liberals, but they became more exclusive after the 1960s, according to Dr. Haidt. “The fight for civil rights and against racism became the sacred cause unifying the left throughout American society, and within the academy,” he said, arguing that this shared morality both “binds and blinds.”

“If a group circles around sacred values, they will evolve into a tribal-moral community,” he said. “They’ll embrace science whenever it supports their sacred values, but they’ll ditch it or distort it as soon as it threatens a sacred value.” It’s easy for social scientists to observe this process in other communities, like the fundamentalist Christians who embrace “intelligent design” while rejecting Darwinism. But academics can be selective, too, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan found in 1965 when he warned about the rise of unmarried parenthood and welfare dependency among blacks — violating the taboo against criticizing victims of racism.

“Moynihan was shunned by many of his colleagues at Harvard as racist,” Dr. Haidt said. “Open-minded inquiry into the problems of the black family was shut down for decades, precisely the decades in which it was most urgently needed. Only in the last few years have liberal sociologists begun to acknowledge that Moynihan was right all along.”

Similarly, Larry Summers, then president of Harvard, was ostracized in 2005 for wondering publicly whether the preponderance of male professors in some top math and science departments might be due partly to the larger variance in I.Q. scores among men (meaning there are more men at the very high and very low ends). “This was not a permissible hypothesis,” Dr. Haidt said. “It blamed the victims rather than the powerful. The outrage ultimately led to his resignation. We psychologists should have been outraged by the outrage. We should have defended his right to think freely.”

Instead, the taboo against discussing sex differences was reinforced, so universities and the National Science Foundation went on spending tens of millions of dollars on research and programs based on the assumption that female scientists faced discrimination and various forms of unconscious bias. But that assumption has been repeatedly contradicted, most recently in a study published Monday in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by two Cornell psychologists, Stephen J. Ceci and Wendy M. Williams. After reviewing two decades of research, they report that a woman in academic science typically fares as well as, if not better than, a comparable man when it comes to being interviewed, hired, promoted, financed and published.

“Thus,” they conclude, “the ongoing focus on sex discrimination in reviewing, interviewing and hiring represents costly, misplaced effort. Society is engaged in the present in solving problems of the past.” Instead of presuming discrimination in science or expecting the sexes to show equal interest in every discipline, the Cornell researchers say, universities should make it easier for women in any field to combine scholarship with family responsibilities.

Can social scientists open up to outsiders’ ideas? Dr. Haidt was optimistic enough to title his speech “The Bright Future of Post-Partisan Social Psychology,” urging his colleagues to focus on shared science rather than shared moral values. To overcome taboos, he advised them to subscribe to National Review and to read Thomas Sowell’s “A Conflict of Visions.”

For a tribal-moral community, the social psychologists in Dr. Haidt’s audience seemed refreshingly receptive to his argument. Some said he overstated how liberal the field is, but many agreed it should welcome more ideological diversity. A few even endorsed his call for a new affirmative-action goal: a membership that’s 10 percent conservative by 2020. The society’s executive committee didn’t endorse Dr. Haidt’s numerical goal, but it did vote to put a statement on the group’s home page welcoming psychologists with “diverse perspectives.” It also made a change on the “Diversity Initiatives” page — a two-letter correction of what it called a grammatical glitch, although others might see it as more of a Freudian slip.

In the old version, the society announced that special funds to pay for travel to the annual meeting were available to students belonging to “underrepresented groups (i.e., ethnic or racial minorities, first-generation college students, individuals with a physical disability, and/or lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgendered students).”

As Dr. Haidt noted in his speech, the “i.e.” implied that this was the exclusive, sacred list of “underrepresented groups.” The society took his suggestion to substitute “e.g.” — a change that leaves it open to other groups, too. Maybe, someday, even to conservatives.

OK, then, this article stirred up a lot of responses - more than 500 comments, many of them less than open-minded. In fact, the comments tend to reflect the degree of polarization that exists between liberal and conservative perspectives in this country.

So NPR decided to run an interview with Haidt to discuss the issue.

Expert Finds Bias — Among Bias Researchers

February 15, 2011

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Each year, psychologists gather to discuss research on racial intolerance, sexism, and other forms of bias. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt researches bias, and discovered an unexpected form of prejudice among his own colleagues: political bias.

***

NEAL CONAN, host:

The buzz from the most recent annual conference on the Society of Personality and Social Psychology was a paper about bias among social psychologists.

Jonathan Haidt began with an informal audience poll of the 1,000 social scientists in attendance. He asked, how many considered themselves politically liberal? About 80 percent raised their hands. He then asked for centrists or libertarians; fewer than a dozen hands went up. When he asked for self-identified conservatives, only three hands went up. That, he told his audience, is a statistically impossible lack of diversity. In other words, it's the product of institutional ideological bias.

So let's hear from social psychologists. Is Haidt right? And what difference does it make? 800-989-8255. Email us: talk@npr.org. You can also join the conversation on our website. It's at npr.org. Click on TALK OF THE NATION.

Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist at the University of Virginia, with us from a studio on the campus there. Nice to have you with us today.

Professor JONATHAN HAIDT (University of Virginia): Nice to be here, Neal.

CONAN: And the issue here is not that conservatives are necessarily underrepresented in social science, not that there is an issue of discrimination, but that non-liberals are actually disappearing and conforming to the majority view.

Prof. HAIDT: That's right. That was really the thing that was concerning me, was not that they're underrepresented. A lot of the critics in the bloggers have said, oh, there's lots of reasons why conservatives will be underrepresented in academe. You know, they're low intelligence, things like that, they say.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Prof. HAIDT: But, you know, the thing that was bothering me wasn't that they're underrepresented. It's that they're basically absent. And when you have - we have a whole community of scientists who share a position, then the system breaks down.

CONAN: And the system breaks down. What do you mean by that?

Prof. HAIDT: Well, I can - I guess I can give you about 20 percent of the psychology of reasoning with two words - that is, confirmation bias. It refers to the fact that we humans are extraordinarily good at finding justifications for whatever conclusion we want to reach. We can spot a supporting justification at 200 meters hiding in a tree. But if it's dangling in front of our face and it goes against our position, we can't see it. And so science works not because we scientists are so smart or so fair or so rational. Science works because it's an institution that puts us all together where we're really, really good at knocking down each other's reasons. And when anybody is doing research on a politically sensitive topic and there is nobody on the other side to raise an objection, well, the science suffers.

CONAN: Nobody challenges the thought and therefore a thesis, a theory that may be invalid goes unchallenged.

Prof. HAIDT: Exactly.

CONAN: And I wonder, what was the reaction in the room when you presented this idea?

Prof. HAIDT: Overwhelmingly positive. I'm actually really proud of my field. It's not - this is not a story about, you know, academics gone wild and, you know, partisan activists and things like that. The overwhelming response was, yeah, you know, I kind of thought that all along. I'm glad somebody finally said it. There was very little defensiveness.

In fact, I actually urged that we change our diversity policy and our affirmative action policy to stop specifying the official list of groups and say what we really are after here is people bring diverse perspectives. And the next day they changed that policy on the Web.

CONAN: So it had an immediate effect?

Prof. HAIDT: A small one, and people are talking about it. So we'll see if anything happens.

CONAN: I wonder, were there any objections though?

Prof. HAIDT: None voiced to me. But, of course, you know, I'm social psychologist. I understand that we don't exactly speak our minds in social situations. So I always, you know, ask my students and everybody else, what have you heard behind the scenes? And I have heard from a few people who are upset. But I'm really surprised at how, you know, how little I've been attacked.

CONAN: Conformity, does that suggests that people who might have conservative views after they joined the profession changed them, or does it suggests that people of liberal bent self-select?

Prof. HAIDT: It's self-selection mostly. And the real problem, I think, is that there is almost enough diversity out there in terms of people who are interested in the field, and there are some graduate students. And actually, one of the important points, it's not - this isn't even so much about conservatives. The people who are writing to me now are mostly not even conservative. They're people who say, I'm a centrist or I'm a liberal Christian. They're just people who aren't secular liberals. And they feel excluded. They feel unwelcome. And so they either keep quiet or they back out.

CONAN: And this is a phenomenon that may vary ideology to ideology, depending on the circumstances of the particular field.

Prof. HAIDT: Exactly. I mean, the point of my talk was that we form tribal moral communities. And I wasn't picking on my field in particular. This is just the nature of humankind. We're really, really good at identifying sacred principles and objects and values, and then we circle around them and then we trust each other and we work together.

You know - and that's great if you're the military of the police or, you know, if you're Zappos.com, whatever it is. If you have a job to do, it helps to all share values. But if the job that you are trying to do is to find the truth, then sharing the values is actually counterproductive.

CONAN: It's hard to find a profession - again, you know, that sort of tribal identity is important in almost every profession, but it's hard to find a profession where diversity of views would not be helpful.

Prof. HAIDT: Well, if - I disagree with that. I think if your job is to get people to suppress their self-interest and sacrifice for the group, then diversity is harmful. But if your job is to figure out what's really going on in the outside world, then you absolutely need it. So I would say academics, the, you know, defense intelligence community, the leadership of the military could really use it even if the rank and file might not need it.

CONAN: We're talking with Jonathan Haidt, associate psychologist at the University of Virginia about an article about his research on political bias in the field of social science. The piece ran in the New York Times last week, which got us interested in it.

Read the rest of it at the NPR site.

I find this all very interesting - the program I am in (community counseling) which one might think to be very liberal in its approach, especially with all the emphasis on multiculturalism, is actually quite conservative. We had an honest to god fundamentalist Christian teaching about sexuality in counseling - a very closed-minded woman who at one point listed Catholics and Christians as different religions.

Maybe I would be getting a better education if I were in one of those schools dominated by liberals. Alas, I will never know.

Tags: Politics, perspectives, bias, Psychology, morality, communities, worldviews, tribal, Social Scientist Sees Bias Within, John Tierney, Jonathan Haidt, social sciences, NPR, Talk of the Nation, Neal Conan, Society for Personality and Social Psychology, social psychology, political bias