Did We Really Need a Study to Confirm the Obvious?

The obvious needs confirmation in order to test the accuracy of what people believe, as it is not always supported by facts. This is especially ...

If we learned anything after the cultural moment that was Covid-19, it's that we're all supposed to indubitably "trust the science.

For the same reason, it is easy to come up with plausible sounding hypotheses about even highly complex social and political problems — the ...

Medical researchers have unlocked the human genome, wiped out smallpox and made great strides in the fight against AIDS. They have also ...

... did we need such an expensive study to tell us the obvious? Gender-based violence, including intimate partner violence (IPV), an area that I ...

Still, there's more to duh research than meets the eye. Experts say they have to prove the obvious — and prove it again and again — to influence ...

Every year, serious scientists undertake detailed, rigorous studies to prove things that seem-well, painfully obvious. Why bother? We reviewed ...

To start, we should ask how obvious our results really are. Although we clearly have some insights into human behavior, our ability to predict ...

Of course, this is important information for crafting public health initiatives, but did they really need the study to know people prefer to ...

Truth can be stranger than fiction. Or more mundane. We should not base judgments of validity on novelty. This should be kept in mind with ...

Several studies have already demonstrated the value of collecting predictions, particularly about who to get predictions from. One by DellaVigna ...

What we think is obvious still needs to be proven with rigorous study if we want to do science properly. Even things like 1+1 has incredibly ...

Sometimes it takes long, hard study to pin down what we thought we knew all along—and to reveal surprising findings beneath the surface of ...

In fact, collecting enough evidence to convince people to make changes is one of the biggest reasons we see so much “obvious” research. When ...

By definition it would be unfair of us to expect the falsification of cautious conjectures to be routine. We have to test lots of statements ...

For instance, consider the finding that stress is not good for your health. Do we really need to “waste” millions of dollars to study stress and ...

So, to answer the original question, we prove things in order to show how obvious they are, not the other way around (which is what occurs in ...

Researchers who seek to prove the obvious wrong. • Researchers who need data to confirm a belief so that programs can be funded. "The first type ...

Cognitive biases: Humans have inherent biases that shape their perception and reasoning. Confirmation bias, for instance, leads people to favor ...

The need for research is obvious—we wouldn't have any medical breakthroughs without it. However we seem to forget that even scientific studies ...