問題詳情


(C)“I see a train wreck looming,” warned Daniel Kahneman, an eminent psychologist,in an open letter last year. The premonition concerned research on a phenomenon knownas “priming.” Priming studies suggest that decisions can be influenced by apparentlyirrelevant actions or events that took place just before the cusp of choice. They havebeen a boom area in psychology over the past decade, and some of their insights havealready made it out of the lab and into the toolkits of policy wonks keen on “nudging”the populace.       Dr. Kahneman and a growing number of his colleagues fear that a lot of thispriming research is poorly founded. Over the past few years various researchers havemade systematic attempts to replicate some of the more widely cited primingexperiments. Many of these replications have failed. In April, for instance, a paper inPLoS ONE, a journal, reported that nine separate experiments had not managed toreproduce the results of a famous study from 1998 purporting to show that thinkingabout a professor before taking an intelligence test leads to a higher score thanimagining a football hooligan.       The idea that the same experiments always get the same results, no matter whoperforms them, is one of the cornerstones of science’s claim to objective truth. If asystematic campaign of replication does not lead to the same results, then either theoriginal research is flawed (as the replicators claim) or the replications are (as many ofthe original researchers on priming contend). Either way, something is awry.       It is tempting to see the priming fracas as an isolated case in an area ofscience—psychology—easily marginalized as soft and wayward. But irreproducibility ismuch more widespread. A few years ago scientists at Amgen, an American drugcompany, tried to replicate 53 studies that they considered landmarks in the basicscience of cancer, often co-operating closely with the original researchers to ensure thattheir experimental technique matched the one used first time round. According to apiece they wrote last year in Nature, a leading scientific journal, they were able toreproduce the original results in just six. Months earlier Florian Prinz and his colleaguesat Bayer HealthCare, a German pharmaceutical giant, reported in Nature Reviews DrugDiscovery, a sister journal, that they had successfully reproduced the published results injust a quarter of 67 seminal studies.       The governments of the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries, spent $59 billionon biomedical research in 2012, nearly double the figure in 2000. One of thejustifications for this is that basic-science results provided by governments form thebasis for private drug-development work. If companies cannot rely on academicresearch, that reasoning breaks down. When an official at America’s National Institutesof Health (NIH) reckons, despairingly, that researchers would find it hard to reproduceat least three-quarters of all published biomedical findings, the public part of the processseems to have failed.       Academic scientists readily acknowledge that they often get things wrong. But theyalso hold fast to the idea that these errors get corrected over time as other scientists tryto take the work further. Evidence that many more dodgy results are published than aresubsequently corrected or withdrawn calls that much-vaunted capacity forself-correction into question. There are errors in a lot more of the scientific papers beingpublished, written about and acted on than anyone would normally suppose, or like tothink.       Various factors contribute to the problem. Statistical mistakes are widespread. Thepeer reviewers who evaluate papers before journals commit to publishing them are muchworse at spotting mistakes than they or others appreciate. Professional pressure,competition and ambition push scientists to publish more quickly than would be wise. Acareer structure which lays great stress on publishing copious papers exacerbates allthese problems. “There is no cost to getting things wrong,” says Brian Nosek, apsychologist at the University of Virginia who has taken an interest in his discipline’spersistent errors. “The cost is not getting them published.”
77. What is the main idea of the passage?
(A) Scientists tend to think of science as self-correcting, but it is not.
(B) Politicians should not have used priming studies to please the populace.
(C) Reproducibility is the foundation for verifying scientific research.
(D) Irreproducibility has troubled scientists and governments.

參考答案

答案：A
難度：困難0.27027
統計：A(10),B(5),C(16),D(5),E(0)

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