I've decided to quit posting company or industry sponsored nutrition studies. Essentially, companies through these "researchers" are allowed to make claims that would quickly earn the wrath of the FDA if the same funds were used to purchase Ads.
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Simply Disclosing
Funds Behind Studies
May Not Erase Bias
By SHIRLEY S. WANG
August 4, 2006; Page A11
Think you can't be bought for the price of a pen? Neither do most people. But we can be notoriously poor at judging ourselves, and our honesty, psychologists say.
For example, biomedical researchers reprimanded for failing to disclose financial ties to companies whose drugs or medical devices they study seem baffled over what they did wrong.
In the past few weeks, several top journals have published corrections noting that authors of papers failed to reveal they had served as paid consultants or speakers for companies whose products they studied, often receiving thousands of dollars. Such conflicts of interest are emerging as a major concern in research.
Studies show that even small gifts create feelings of obligation, and that those feelings can influence subsequent decisions, so why do many researchers feel they're immune to conflicts of interest?
Just as we fool ourselves into thinking we're more ethical, kind and generous than we are, so scientists can be blind to the very real possibility that their work is inappropriately influenced by financial ties. These psychological processes usually operate so subtly that people aren't aware that such ties can bias their judgment.
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Receiving gifts and money creates the desire, often unconscious, to give something back, says Max Bazerman of Harvard Business School. Even small gifts can have an influence. Charities that send out free address labels, for example, get more in donations than those that don't. Customers who are given a 50-cent key chain at a pharmacy spend substantially more in the store.
Conflicts can be hard to recognize, because "cognitive bias" comes into play. "The mind has an enormous ability to see the world as we want," says Dr. Bazerman.
We are more likely to scrutinize information when it's inconsistent with how we want to see things, something psychologists call motivated skepticism. If a study about an anticipated new drug is sponsored by the manufacturer, "we don't kick into a higher gear of criticism," says psychologist David Dunning of Cornell University. "We just accept the findings" if they are positive, without digging too hard for possible flaws in methodology or statistics.
Studies of psychiatric drugs by researchers with a financial conflict of interest -- receiving speaking fees, owning stock, or being employed by the manufacturer -- are nearly five times as likely to find benefits in taking the drugs as studies by researchers who don't receive money from the industry, according to a review of 162 studies published last year in the American Journal of Psychiatry. Studies that the industry funded, but in which the researchers had no other financial ties, didn't have significantly different results than nonindustry-funded studies.
Studies can be designed in ways that boost the likelihood that results will come out a certain way, says Lisa Bero of the University of California, San Francisco. A new treatment can be compared with a placebo, instead of with a treatment already in use, making finding a significant statistical difference between the two more likely. Dosage and timing of medications, which make a big difference in their effectiveness and side effects, can also be manipulated, she says.
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While studies in reputable journals are reviewed by experts in the field prior to publication, data require interpretation, which opens the door to subjectivity. If the numbers don't show an overall benefit of a drug, for instance, scientists with financial ties to the company might dig deeper to find one, perhaps to one small group, say, white women over 50 years of age.
Because it's rare for studies to show that one variable clearly causes an outcome, there's always room for doubt. Conflicted individuals, says Prof. Bazerman, "continue to have doubts long after objective observers are convinced by the evidence," as when some tobacco executives refused to admit that smoking is related to risk of cancer.
But simply disclosing financial ties, as many journals require of authors, may not help. In fact, it may make things worse. For one thing, readers don't know how much, if at all, a conflict has skewed the reported results.
In a 2005 experiment done by Harvard's Daylian Cain and colleagues, volunteers were given advice about how much money was in a jar of coins. In some cases, the advisers were unconflicted, and the volunteers used the advice to make good guesses about the coins (which they saw only fleetingly and from a distance). In other cases, the advisers had a monetary incentive to overestimate the value of the coins. The volunteers knew this, and adjusted the advice downward. But they didn't adjust enough, and overestimated the value.
Disclosure poses another problem: It may unconsciously tempt researchers to exaggerate their findings or put an even more pro-company spin on their data to counteract the expected reader skepticism. "If disclosure encourages you to cover your ears, it makes me shout louder," Dr. Cain says. |
