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"The recent analysis published in JAMA reviewed the success of ClinicalTrials.gov in two time periods – 2004-2007 and 2007-2010. The findings are rather troubling if you want your studies to meet the highest possible standards — between 2007 and 2010, only 48% of eligible trials were registered before patient enrollment had commenced. Granted, this was up from 33% in the earlier period, but it’s still the minority. The majority (52%) were registered after patient enrollment had started.

This means that most clinical trials are being registered after it’s theoretically possible that investigators have had a chance to peek at early data and tweak the enrollment criteria to generate a “better” trial."

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"Alarming cracks are starting to penetrate deep into the scientific edifice. They threaten the status of science and its value to society. And they cannot be blamed on the usual suspects — inadequate funding, misconduct, political interference, an illiterate public. Their cause is bias, and the threat they pose goes to the heart of research."

science bias communication public-understanding risk biology experiments reproduction error

media bias trust

"The reemergence of a prominent partisan press has led many scholars to investigate partisan self-selection of news outlets. Political scientists and journalists have concluded that individuals are motivated to select media sources that match their own political views and avoid media sources that challenge their political views. However, an analysis of individuals’ actual media exposure patterns lead to conclusions about selective exposure quite different from previous research based on self-reported media exposure."

media bias exposure politics

The authors test the hypothesis that low-effort thought promotes political conservatism. In Study 1, alcohol intoxication was measured among bar patrons; as blood alcohol level increased, so did political conservatism (controlling for sex, education, and political identification). In Study 2, participants under cognitive load reported more conservative attitudes than their no-load counterparts. In Study 3, time pressure increased participants' endorsement of conservative terms. In Study 4, participants considering political terms in a cursory manner endorsed conservative terms more than those asked to cogitate; an indicator of effortful thought (recognition memory) partially mediated the relationship between processing effort and conservatism. Together these data suggest that political conservatism may be a process consequence of low-effort thought; when effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases.

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“People endorse conservative ideology more when they have to give a first or fast response,” Eidelman said. “This low-effort thinking seems to favor political conservatism, suggesting that it may be our default ideology. To be clear, we are not saying that conservatives think lightly.”

political-science psychology cognition style bias effort conservative

"Would you make the same decisions in a foreign language as you would in your native tongue? It may be intuitive that people would make the same choices regardless of the language they are using, or that the difficulty of using a foreign language would make decisions less systematic. We discovered, however, that the opposite is true: Using a foreign language reduces decision-making biases. Four experiments show that the framing effect disappears when choices are presented in a foreign tongue. Whereas people were risk averse for gains and risk seeking for losses when choices were presented in their native tongue, they were not influenced by this framing manipulation in a foreign language. Two additional experiments show that using a foreign language reduces loss aversion, increasing the acceptance of both hypothetical and real bets with positive expected value. We propose that these effects arise because a foreign language provides greater cognitive and emotional distance than a native tongue does. "

foreign-language learning psychology bias

"Although Herbert Simon's work is often cited by political scientists, it has not generated a large research program in the discipline. This is a waste of a major intellectual resource. The main challenge to the rational choice research program—now the most important research program in political science—can be developed by building on Simon's ideas on bounded rationality. The essay defends this assertion by examining how the work of both the early Simon (primarily satisficing-and-search models) and the later Simon (on problem solving) can shed light on important topics in our discipline such as budgeting, turnout, and party competition."

rationality bias bounded-rationality limits political-science economics organizations

"In the review piece, Bendon notes that there are two main branches of BR approaches – that pioneered by Simon (and March), and that associated with Kahneman and Tversky (K&T). These two approaches are compatible, but different in focus. K&T focus on universal or nearly universal errors in judgment (prospect theory) or perception (framing effects, where the description of otherwise identical choices can influence decisions). Simon, on the other hand, was more interested in processes of decision-making in light of the impossibility of by-the-book rationality."

rationality bias bounded-rationality limits political-science economics

"My guest was Yale’s Dan Kahan, who was also on the show a year earlier, discussing his cultural cognition model. This is a very powerful and increasingly influential account of how different ideological groups–hierarchs, individualists, egalitarians, communitarians–are biased towards rejecting science on particular topics that are, shall we say, in their emotionally defensive “zones.”

Kahan ascribes this to motivated reasoning--e.g., our preexisting emotional commitments, or group commitments, skew our reading of evidence (scientific or otherwise) and lead us to elaborately defend our prior commitments. And because hierarchical-individualists have a very different vision of the “good” society and how it is organized than do egalitarian-communitarians, they accordingly reason very differently about scientific issues that threaten their values (like global warming) than do those on the other side."

politics psychology motivated-cognition reasoning group cognition bias

"On the origin of value, "In Marx's judgment surplus value is the entire basis of capitalism: all value in capitalism is the surplus value created by labour." And so Marx "creates a model which allows us to see deeply into the structure of the world, and see the labour hidden in the things all around us. He makes labour legible in objects and relationships.""

marx capitalism empiricism bias economics

"We perform an experiment designed to assess the accuracy of beliefs about distributions. The beliefs relate to behavior (mobile phone purchasing decisions, hypothetical restaurant choices), attitudes (happiness, politics) and observable characteristics (height, weight) and are typically formed through real world experiences. We nd a powerful and ubiquitous bias in perceptions that is \self-centered" in the sense that an individual's beliefs about the population distribution changes with their own position in the distribution. In particular, those at extremes tend to perceive themselves as closer to the middle of the distribution than is the case. We discuss possible explanations for this bias"

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When most people hear “NPR,” they think Cokie Roberts, Nina Totenberg, Robert Siegel, and for some on the far right, all that is wrong with the mainstream liberal media. But beneath the veneer of the "Minnesota nice," a simmering battle has been waged, and in the balance hangs NPR’s future and perhaps even its soul—as either a nonpartisan defender of in-depth journalism or a target of the partisan sniping of the sound-bite era. David Margolick explores how NPR’s management managed to squander the advantages of the national dole, deep-pocketed donors, a roster of top-notch reporters, and the loyalty of legions of devoted Click and Clack fans—and whether it can recover from the annus horribilis of 2011.

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"After a hard look, I realized that they had bombed on the questions that challenged their position. A full tabulation of all 17 questions showed that no group clearly out-stupids the others. They appear about equally stupid when faced with proper challenges to their position. "

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"The Misconception: You do nice things for the people you like and bad things to the people you hate.

The Truth: You grow to like people for whom you do nice things and hate people you harm."

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"In any case, while I agree that everybody has biases, I’m not sure that means I must also agree that everybody is equally biased. To butcher George Orwell, why couldn’t it be the case that all humans are biased, but are some humans are more biased than others?"

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