Is science synonymous with ‘truth’? Game theory says, ‘not always’. | Kevin Zollman | Big Think

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Uh, game theory can be applied to scientific understanding in a lot of different ways. One of the interesting things about contemporary science is that it's done by these large groups of people who are interacting with one another. So, science isn't just the lone scientist in his lab removed from everyone else, but rather it's teams working together, sometimes in competition with other teams who are trying to beat them out to make a big discovery.

So, it's become much more like a kind of economic interaction. These scientists are striving for credit from their peers, for grants from federal agencies, and so a lot of the decisions that they make are strategic in nature. They're trying to decide what things will get funded, what strategies are most likely to lead to a scientific advance, how can they do things so as to get a leg up on their competition, and also get the acclaim of their peers.

Game theory helps us to understand how the incentives that scientists face in trying to get credit, in trying to get grants, and trying to get acclaim might affect the decisions that they make. And sometimes there are cases where scientists striving to get acclaim can actually make science worse because a scientist might commit fraud if he thinks he can get away with it, or a scientist might rush a result out the door even though she's not completely sure that it's correct, in order to beat the competition.

So, those of us who use game theory in order to try and understand science apply it in order to understand how those incentives that scientists face might eventually impact their ability to produce truths and useful information that we as a society can go on. Or how those incentives might encourage them to do things that are harmful to the progress of science by either publishing things that are wrong or fraudulent, or even withholding information that would be valuable.

This is one of the big problems that a lot of people have identified with the way that scientists’ scientific incentives work right now. Scientists get credit for publication, and they're encouraged to publish exciting new findings that demonstrate some new phenomena that we've never seen before. But when a scientist fails to find something that's informative, too, the fact that I was unable to reproduce a result of another scientist shows that maybe that was an error.

But the way that the system is set up right now, I wouldn't get credit for publishing what's called a null result, a finding where I didn't discover something that somebody else had claimed to discover. So, as a result, when we look at the scientific results that show up in the journals that have been published, it turns out that they are skewed towards positive findings and against null results.

A lot of different people have suggested that we need to change the way that scientists are incentivized by rewarding scientists more for both publishing null results and for trying to replicate the results of others. In particular, in fields like psychology and medicine, places where there's a lot of findings and there are lots of things to look at, people really think that we might want to change the incentives a little bit in order to encourage more duplication of effort, in order to make sure that a kind of exciting but probably wrong result doesn't end up going unchallenged in the literature.

Traditionally, until very recently, scientists were mostly looking for the acclaim of their peers. You succeeded in science when you got the acclaim of another scientist in your field, or maybe some scientists outside your field. But now, as the area of science journalism is increasing, the public is starting to get interested in science, and so scientists are starting to be rewarded for doing things that the public is interested in.

This has a good side and a bad side. The good side is it means that scientists are driven to do research that has public impact, that people are going to find useful and interesting, and that helps to encourage scientists not just to pursue some esoteric question that maybe is completely irrelevant to people's everyday life. The bad ...