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The Lounge
General Discussion
"Expected Result" Bias in Research
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[QUOTE="person123, post: 6442831, member: 611120"] Hi. I'm an undergraduate student and I've been doing research in Civil Engineering for a couple years now. One thing which I've thought about repeatedly is a bias toward the desired result. Of course sometimes people might be biased for some ulterior motive or sloppy work, but the bias I'm interested is one where it's unclear to me what the correct approach is. Say you're running an experiment and a gauge reads a result which is clearly wrong; maybe it goes against all previous work, it's not physically possible, or just doesn't make sense. It might be reasonable to discard that result, or maybe check/replace the gauge -- to do something in response to that specific reading. In a way you're biased (you wouldn't discard the result if it seemed reasonable), but it makes some sense to be biased (you don't want to rerun the entire experiment because of one reading, and you don't want to publish a result which is clearly wrong). How do you decide when it makes sense to be biased? When are you being reasonable, and when are you trying to fit the data with the results you're looking for? People who do research, has this been a significant concern for you? [/QUOTE]
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"Expected Result" Bias in Research
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