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Although Slate is my favorite magazine, and usually the first website I check each day, I've been known to complain about its science coverage, which typically lacks the insight of its other features. A much-too-rare exception to this are the occasional articles by Daniel Engber (full disclosure: I have attempted to convince Engber, a Slate editor, to run articles by me in the past, unsuccessfully).
Yesterday, he wrote an excellent piece about a recent bit of cognitive neuroscience looking at bullies and how they relate to bullying. Researchers scanned the brains of "bullies" while they viewed videos of bullying and reported that pleasure centers in the brain activated.
In a cheeky fashion typical of Slate, Engber questions the novelty of these findings:
Bullies like bullying? I just felt a shiver run up my spine. Next we'll find out that alcoholics like alcohol. Or that overeaters like to overeat. Hey, I've got an idea for a brain-imaging study of child-molesters that'll just make your skin crawl!
Obviously, I was a sympathetic reader. But Engber does not stop there:
OK, OK: Why am I wasting time on a study so lame that it got a write-up in the Onion? Hasn't this whole fMRI backlash routine gotten a bit passé?
Engber goes on to detail a number of limitations to the study, including how the kids were defined as "bullies" (some appear to be rapists, for instance) and also how "pleasure center" was defined (the area in question is also related to anxiety, so one could reasonably argue bullies find bullying worrisome, not pleasurable).
The second half of the article is a plea for better science reporting, one that I hope is widely-read. Read it yourself here.
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Comments
That's why I read ScienceBlog
November 20, 2008 by levbor, 50 weeks 3 days ago
Comment id: 32949
Newspapers are interested in rating, and sane science reporting doesn't help increase it. Actually, demanding science reporters to understand what they are writing about doesn't increase the rating at all. So here we are.
press releases
November 19, 2008 by coglanglab, 50 weeks 4 days ago
Comment id: 32942
The main news feed of Scienceblogs is definitely press releases. I agree it would be nice if they were labeled as such, but I actually like that there is a place that aggregates such things, which is part of why I participate in this site. I don't think there is anything wrong with press releases or using them -- I just would like more in-depth reporting as well.
The fact that you need a research account to view most journals is a problem, and there has been some movement in this area. I've personally published with PLoS, which is open source, and several government agencies (and my home, Harvard) have come out in favor of open-source journals.
One thing that people should be aware of is that many researchers -- myself included -- post their papers on their website. So if you know the author's name, try Googling them. There is a good chance the paper is available for free on their website.
Please try my web-based experiments
Ahem
November 19, 2008 by Anonymous, 50 weeks 4 days ago
Comment id: 32941
We have here a post on scienceblog.com which links to an article in a second source which decries the practice of a third source simply reprinting press releases. Most of the material here on science blog itself is just press release reprints--sometimes attributed, sometimes not. Coglanglab being an exception, of course.
What we almost never see, here or elsewhere, is links to the actual research. Sometimes that research appears in refereed journals which can't be viewed for free--though even in these cases links to abstracts and purchase pages could be provided. (Better yet, arXiv pre-prints) Other times, the research hasn't been accepted or even submitted to journals. We are at the mercy of the original press release author, who is likely not a scientist and likely has the best interest of their employers at heart.
I'd like to see a new standard in science reporting, kind of like the Nutrition Facts block on packaged foods. All press releases and subsequent materials based on them should have a standard block stating who did the research, who paid them, when and where and if the research has been peer-reviewed, and whether the author of the current piece was involved in the research.