Reading 2 Sometimes it seems surprising that science functions at all. In 2005, medical sciencewas shaken by a paper with the provocative title "'Why most published research findingsare false." Written by John Ioannidis, a professor of medicine at Stanford University,the paper didn't actually show that any particular result was wrong. Instead, it showedthat the statistics of reported positive findings was not consistent with how often oneshould expect to find them. As Ioannidis concluded more recently, "many publishedresearch findings are false or exaggerated, and an estimated 85 percent of researchresources are wasted." It's likely that some researchers are consciously cherry-picking data to get their workpublished. And some of the problems surely lie with journal publication policies. Butthe problems of false findings often begin with researchers unwittingly foolingthemselves: they fall prey to cognitive biases, common modes of thinking that lure ustoward wrong but convenient or attractive conclusions. "Seeing the reproducibility ratesin psychology and other empirical science, we can safely say that something is notworking out the way it should," says Susann Fiedler, a behavioral economist at the MaxPlanck Institute for Research on Collective Goods in Bonn, Germany. "Cognitive biasesmight be one reason for that." Psychologist Brian Nosek of the University of Virginia says that the most common andproblematic bias in science is "motivated reasoning": We interpret observations to fit aparticular idea. Psychologists have shown that "most of our reasoning is in factrationalization," he says. In other words, we have already made the decision about whatto do or to think, and our "explanation" of our reasoning is really a justification fordoing what we wanted to do-or to believe-anyway. Science is of course meant to bemore objective and skeptical than everyday thought--but how much is it, really? Whereas the falsification model of the scientific method championed by philosopherKarl Popper posits that the scientist looks for ways to test and falsify her theories--toask "How am I wrong?"--Nosek says that scientists usually ask instead "How am Iright?" (or equally, to ask "How are you wrong?"). When facts come up that suggest wemight, in fact, not be right after all, we are inclined to dismiss them as irrelevant, if notindeed mistaken. The now infamous "cold fusion" episode in the late 1980s, instigatedby the electrochemists Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons, was full of such ad hocbrush-ofis. For example, when it was pointed out to Fleischmann and Pons that theirenergy spectrum of the gamma rays from their claimed fusion reaction had its spike atthe wrong energy, they simply moved it, muttering something ambiguous aboutcalibration.
【題組】27. Why does the author say "sometimes it seems surprising that science functionsat all" in the first paragraph?
(A) There exists a surprisingly large number of unexpected findings inpublished science research.
(B) Medical science papers with provocative titles have shaken the credibilityof science journals.
(C) Findings from science research often lack potential for real-worldapplications.
(D) Valuable findings are disproportionate to the large amount of resourcesdevoted to science research.
(E) A large number of findings in published science research are unreliable.