“Can’t Believe It” (we deny research findings that defy our beliefs)

So, I have been running a little experiment on twitter. Oh well, it doesn’t really deserve the term “experiment” – at least in an academic vocabulary – because there certainly are no treatment effects or control groups. It does deserve the term “little” though, because there are only four observations.

My experiment was to post a few recent findings from academic research that some might find mildly controversial or – as it turns out – offending. These four hair raising findings were 1) selling junk food in schools does not lead to increased obesity, 2) family-friendly workplace practices do not improve firm performance (although they do not decrease them either), 3) girls take longer to heal from concussions, 4) firms headed up by CEOs with broader faces show higher profitability.

Only mildly controversial I’d say, and only to some. I was just curious to see what reactions it would trigger. Because I have noticed in the past that people seem inclined to dismiss academic evidence if they don’t like the results. If the results are in line with their own beliefs and preconceptions, its methods and validity are much less likely to be called stupid.  

Selling junk food in schools does not lead to increased obesity is the finding of a very careful study by professors Jennifer Van Hook and Claire Altman. It provides strong evidence that selling junk food in schools does not lead to more fat kids. One can then speculate why this is – and their explanation that children’s food patterns and dietary preferences get established well before adolescence may be a plausible one – but you can’t deny their facts. Yet, it did lead to “clever” reactions such as “says more about academic research than junk food, I fear...”, by people who clearly hadn’t actually read the study.

Family-friendly workplace practices do not improve firm performance is another finding that is not welcomed by all. This large and competent study, by professors Nick Bloom, Toby Kretschmer and John van Reenen, was actually read by some, be it clearly without a proper understanding of its methodology (which, indeed, it being an academic paper, is hard to fully appreciate without proper research methodology training). It led to reactions that the study was “in fact, wrong”, made “no sense”, or even that it really showed the opposite; these silly professors just didn’t realise it.

Girls take longer to heal from concussions is the empirical fact established by Professor Tracey Covassin and colleagues.. Of course there is no denying that girls and boys are physiologically different (one cursory look at my sister in the bathtub already taught me that at an early age), but the aforementioned finding still led to swift denials such as “speculation”!

That firms headed up by CEOs with broader faces achieve higher profitability – a careful (and, in my view, quite intriguing) empirical find by my colleague Margaret Ormiston and colleagues – triggered reactions such as “sometimes a study tells you more about the interests of the researcher, than about the object of the study” and “total nonsense”. 

So I have to conclude from my little (academically invalid) mini-experiment that some people are inclined to dismiss results from research if they do not like them – and even without reading the research or without the skills to properly understand it. In contrast, other, nicer findings that I had posted in the past, which people did want to believe, never led to outcries of bad methodology and mentally retarded academics and, in fact, were often eagerly retweeted.

We all look for confirmation of our pre-existing beliefs and don’t like it much if these comfortable convictions are challenged. I have little doubt that this also heavily influences the type of research that companies conduct, condone, publish and pay attention to. Even if the findings are nicer than we preconceived (e.g. the availability of junk food does not make kids consume more of it), we prefer to stick to our old beliefs. And I guess that’s simply human; people’s convictions don’t change easily.