The Science Bubble

From Science Daily:

"...Budtz Pedersen and Hendricks show how the 'breakthroughs' and' turning points' promised by many neuroscience projects -- when combined with the fact that recent studies indicate a number of neuroscience publications seem to lack the statistical power to back their findings -- have the potential to become a fully-fledged science bubble. In other words: the value of the neuroscientific promises and the investments made in them may turn out to bear no relation to the actual value of the scientific results..."

"...Even in the highly rationalised science community, people are susceptible to a social-psychological phenomenon like pluralistic ignorance, where every researcher and policymaker individually may doubt the promises made by a particular research programme but also wrongly believe that everybody else is convinced of its robustness; so they all end up collectively supporting a dubious programme which subsequently receives generous funding," professor Hendricks says and concludes:

"When researchers choose to ignore their private information and instead mimick the actions of researchers before them, they initialise a so-called lemming effect in which everybody publishes in the same journals and applies for funding for the same type of projects. Such a scientific bubble will eventually bust when the programmes' scientific explanations are put to the test, but the problem is that they may already have drained the research system from resources. And then the system will be faced with an investor confidence crisis."

We're all subject to basic laws of economics.