Academic Groupthink: An Information Cascade
This article discusses the problem of groupthink that exists in academia. This centers around the fact that when a prominent researcher or academic in a field publishes a paper or takes a certain stance, few will disagree, instead even conducting studies that tend to support the initial finding. Research that is especially not as quantified (the article gives the example of a study on religious people not being open-minded) can be more biased based on the researcher’s personal beliefs. It is therefore important that researchers and academics don’t just take a finding as fact and do their own research that may look into a contradicting answer. This is very important in science as it is so impactful in everyone’s daily lives.
This relates to the information cascade problem discussed in class and further described in chapter 16. When people are connected through a network (such as an academic network), they can be influenced by each other’s decisions. The more people that can be seen voicing support for a certain research paper (even if they did no further study of their own), the more likely people can be influenced into not looking at other points of view. This is dangerous because mistakes can then go unnoticed and questions unexplored. This relates to what we learned in class of individuals drawing rational inferences from limited information, and in this example depending on one finding to influence their own research.