Battling Bias Across Disciplines

Battling Bias Across Disciplines by Cook & Bynum With the reproducibility of studies in question for both hard and soft sciences, there is a movement afoot to bring improved discipline to the research process.  One way to balance the number of overt and covert biases facing researchers is to increase the use of blind analysis approaches. Decades ago, physicists including Richard Feynman noticed something worrying. New estimates of basic physical constants were often closer to published values than would be expected given standard errors of measurement. They realized that researchers were more likely to ‘confirm’ past results than refute them…