Science Says: Bias and Controversy is a Good Thing...?

How a study of 1 million Amazon books & 200,000 Wikipedia articles revealed an unexpected and counterintuitive result

Science is supposed to be the beacon in the night that burns bright and true against a flurry of opinions, ideas, concepts and, dare I say it, “fake news” that seems to penetrate every aspect of our lives now.

It’s provable and backed up by evidence, even the science we can’t see with the naked eye. Science is truth…or so I thought.

James Evans, a sociologist and computational scientist at the University of Chicago and Director of the Knowledge Lab (that sounds incredibly delightful), wanted to conduct a study on polarizing topics back in 2013.

Evans went into this study fully believing that science would be the least polarizing topic. Science, he thought, was a neutral ground that offered equitable solutions, but that wasn’t the case at all.

Turned out, science was more polarizing than sports.

How is that even possible? Well, Evans analyzed people’s Amazon book purchases and then zeroed in on the recommendations section, you know the section on Amazon where it says, "Customers who bought this item also bought..." He did this across one million books and the resulting pattern was quite fascinating and telling.

Political ideology influenced what science books you read.

For example, liberal readers gravitated toward basic sciences like physics, astronomy, and zoology. While more conservative readers chose applied sciences like criminology, medicine and geophysics.

But what exactly is the difference between these choices?

Well it appears that conservatives prefer learning about science that is functional and often tied to economic growth i.e. career boosters. While, for liberals, science is all about exploration, unraveling new meanings about the world, the universe and yourself.

So, as much as we’d like to think of science as beyond the bias, this study ended up being a strong example of confirmation bias. We choose books that positively reinforce our life views. This was just books, but the same could be applied to other aspects of a person’s life and choices.

This study sort of blew Evans mind and led him to conduct a follow up study to dig deeper into this and the finding of his second study was even more counterintuitive and unexpected.