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Study suggests attacking motives of scientists is just as damaging as attacking the science itself
Argumentum ad hominem [wikipedia.org], 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 [plos.org] (open, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0192025 [doi.org]) 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 [psypost.org] 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 [plos.org] 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 [respectfulinsolence.com].
