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Study Suggests Attacking Motives of Scientists is Just as Damaging as Attacking the Science Itself

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

stormwyrm writes:

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: 5, Informative) by aristarchus on Friday February 16 2018, @08:11PM (2 children)

    by aristarchus (2645) on Friday February 16 2018, @08:11PM (#639001) Journal

    When you attack the motives of the scientist, you attack the trustworthiness of the data. And that's a valid attack.

    Not really. The only reason you are attacking the credibility of the scientist is that you are incapable of refuting the data on its own terms. So this is a classic ad hominem.

    Somewhere on the Internets, may even have been on SN, there was a classic explanation of what an ad hominem is,

    Oh, it was SoylentNews:
    https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=16556&cid=428738#commentwrap [soylentnews.org]

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  • (Score: 2) by Wootery on Saturday February 17 2018, @11:56AM

    by Wootery (2341) on Saturday February 17 2018, @11:56AM (#639304)

    But funding bias is still real. [wikipedia.org]

  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Saturday February 17 2018, @12:16PM

    by FatPhil (863) <{pc-soylent} {at} {asdf.fi}> on Saturday February 17 2018, @12:16PM (#639318) Homepage
    You're wrong, and you're a grotesquely ugly freak!
    --
    Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves