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posted by Fnord666 on Friday February 16 2018, @02:27PM   Printer-friendly
from the character-assassination-for-dummies dept.

Argumentum ad hominem, a well-known fallacy that involves attacking the character or motive of the person making the argument rather than arguing their claims on their merits, is frequently encountered, and despite being fallacious, it is disturbingly effective. A new study in PLOS One (open, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0192025) sheds some further light on just how effective the various types of ad hominem attacks are in the context of scientific claims. An article from Psypost reports on the findings:

Ad hominem arguments — attacking a person to disprove his or her claims — is considered a logical fallacy. But a new study published in PLOS One suggests that some ad hominem attacks can effectively erode people's trust in scientific claims.

The research found that attacking the motives of scientists undermines the belief in a scientific claim just as much as attacking the science itself.

[...] "One key finding is that if members of the general public are aware of a conflict of interest connected to a scientific finding, then this will seriously undermine their faith in that finding," Barnes told PsyPost. "What the study does is allow us to quantitatively compare the amount of attitude change based on knowledge of conflict of interest to the amount of attitude change based on knowledge of outright research fraud and misconduct (such as faking the data)."

"What we see is that knowledge of conflict of interest is just as powerful as knowledge of research fraud."

Further commentary on the study by Orac at Respectful Insolence.


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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday February 16 2018, @03:32PM (4 children)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday February 16 2018, @03:32PM (#638834)

    Any scientist who presents data in favor of conclusion Z is clearly part of the grand conspiracy to do whatever Y tells them. If there's no evidence to support that claim that Y is paying them off, that's simply because we haven't caught them yet.

    This seems to be venturing into the "no true Scotsman" territory, and is definitely taking things too far.

    The challenge when researching a particular topic is unraveling the potential conflicts of interest and determining when a preponderance of unbiased evidence has demonstrated something.

    In the past, one could usually trust the academic community since they were living on tenure and more or less beholden to no-one. Unfortunately, that era has passed and now most academics (including my advisor in 1985) are grant hounds and simply follow the money to whatever conclusion brings more money.

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  • (Score: 2) by fadrian on Friday February 16 2018, @04:06PM (3 children)

    by fadrian (3194) on Friday February 16 2018, @04:06PM (#638861) Homepage

    If you believe money corrupts everything then you might as well give up - everything is alreasdy corrupted. One either needs to start making finer discriminations or give up like you, I guess.

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    • (Score: 3, Informative) by captain normal on Friday February 16 2018, @06:16PM (1 child)

      by captain normal (2205) on Friday February 16 2018, @06:16PM (#638918)

      It's not money that corrupts, it's the love of money over anything else that corrupts.

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      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Monday February 19 2018, @02:46AM

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Monday February 19 2018, @02:46AM (#639930) Journal

        It's not money that corrupts, it's the love of money over anything else that corrupts.

        So how did "money" make Communist countries of the 20th Century go bad? Their money wasn't good enough to cause a lot of love prior to liberalization of their economies (mostly in the 1990s).

    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday February 16 2018, @07:35PM

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday February 16 2018, @07:35PM (#638965)

      Money doesn't corrupt - money given contingent on results corrupts the results, whether the contingency is explicit or implicit.

      If you're doing an oil spill environmental impact study paid for by BP, or Greenpeace, there's implicit bias in the funding: do you want to do future studies for the company or not?

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