• Question: what do you least like about science?

    Asked by lauren_bird to Sam, Rose, Maggi, Kirsty, Ben on 14 Jun 2017.
    • Photo: Rose Turner

      Rose Turner answered on 14 Jun 2017:

      Hi lauren_bird, great question!
      Science focuses on being objective, and being able to make statements that are broadly true for lots of people. As a result individual experiences can sometimes be lost in objective, experimental scientific approaches. I enjoy combining qualitative and quantitative methods to get a fuller understanding of psychological experiences.
      Sometimes studying huge numbers of people (like we do with experiments) can show us that something has an effect and sometimes that gets picked up in the media. For example, some researchers found that an ingredient in carrots can help fight cancer. The media picked that up and suggested that people suffering with cancer should eat loads of carrots! However the effect was so small, that actually you would need to eat SO many carrots to see any impact, it wouldn’t be possible! So it risked giving people false hope. So I don’t like that scientific methods and their associated statistical analyses can be misrepresented. Because of that, when we’re sharing our results we need to be very careful about how we present them – it’s a big responsibility when it could affect people’s lives. Nevertheless, it’s amazing to be discovering things that really can have positive effects on people’s lives!

    • Photo: Kirsty Miller

      Kirsty Miller answered on 14 Jun 2017:

      Hi 🙂 To be honest, one of the things I like the least is that people can be quite distrustful and suspicious of us! This has got much worse in recent years, and it is really difficult if you’ve spent years and years researching something just for someone on Facebook (or a politician 😉 ) to say it’s not true with no evidence! Unfortunately things like social media have made it really easy for people to spread false ‘truths’ or ‘alternative facts’ around, and people often believe them. This makes our jobs really difficult because it’s often much easier for people to read and believe things they see on social media than to listen to us, or read our papers etc! That said, sometimes we don’t make it easy because sometimes scientists don’t explain things too well but that’s something we really need to work at, so the truth is getting out there, and all our hard work and research isn’t going to waste!

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