And Man did not hear Her
July 12th, 2010
Kevin Dunbar is a researcher
who studies how scientists study things —
how they fail and succeed. Philosophers have long
theorized about how science happens, but Dunbar wanted
to get beyond theory. He wasn’t satisfied with abstract models
of the scientific method — that seven-step process we teach schoolkids
before the science fair — or the dogmatic faith scientists place in logic and
objectivity. Dunbar knew that scientists often don’t think the way the textbooks
say they are supposed to. He suspected that all those philosophers of science —
from Aristotle to Karl Popper — had missed something important about
what goes on in the lab. Dunbar’s findings stated that science is a
deeply frustrating pursuit. Although the researchers were
mostly using established techniques, more than
50 percent of their data was unexpected.
(In some labs, the figure exceeded
75 percent.)
How did the researchers
cope with all this unexpected data?
How did they deal with so much failure?
Dunbar realized that the vast majority of people
in the lab followed the same basic strategy. First, they
would blame the method. Then the experiment would be
repeated. This is when things get interesting. According to Dunbar,
even after scientists had generated their “error” multiple times — it was
a consistent inconsistency — they might fail to follow it up.“People have
to pick and choose what’s interesting and what’s not, but they often
choose badly.” And so the result was tossed aside, filed in
a quickly forgotten notebook. The scientists had
discovered a new fact, but they
called it a failure.
The reason we’re so resistant
to anomalous information — the real reason
researchers automatically assume that every unexpected
result is a stupid mistake — is rooted in the way the human brain
works. Over the past few decades, psychologists have dismantled the myth
of objectivity. The fact is, we carefully edit our reality, searching for evidence
that confirms what we already believe. Although we pretend we’re empiricists —
our views dictated by nothing but the facts — we’re actually blinkered,
especially when it comes to information that contradicts our theories.
The problem with science, then, isn’t that most experiments fail —
it’s that most failures are ignored. But the unexpected
result could be the major breakthrough in
particular scope, so we should
keep our eyes open.
