A
People usually adopt beliefs without carefully assessing the evidence for and against those beliefs.
B
People’s perceptions of the fairness of a policy sometimes depend on whether that policy benefits them personally.
C
People usually become emotional when considering financial issues.
D
People often change their minds about issues that do not make significant differences to their lives.
E
People’s evaluations of a situation sometimes depend less on the situation itself than on how it is presented to them.
Scientist: A number of errors can plague a data-collection process. Since examining the collected data enables researchers to detect many of these errors, it is standard practice for researchers to correct collected data. However, in my field, there is a striking tendency for such corrections to favor Jones’s theory; that is, the majority of corrections result in the corrected data’s being closer than the uncorrected data to what Jones’s theory predicts.
"Surprising" Phenomenon
Why do data corrections in the scientist’s field tend to favor Jones’s theory?
Objective
The right answer will be a hypothesis that explains why these data corrections gravitate towards what Jones’s theory predicts. The explanation must either signal that Jones’s theory is correct and errors naturally stray from the theory, or that those doing the data-corrections are themselves biased towards Jones’s theory.
A
Researchers normally give data that is in line with a theory the same weight as data that conflicts with that theory when they are determining whether to accept that theory.
If anything, it seems possible that researchers are giving data less weight when it strays from Jones’s theory. We also have no idea whether or not the theory has been accepted yet.
B
Researchers in the scientist’s field give data that conflicts with Jones’s theory greater scrutiny than they give data that is in line with Jones’s theory.
Researchers go looking for errors in data that conflicts with Jones’s theory. Data that falls in line with Jones’s theory, on the other hand, goes unremarked and uncorrected. This explains why data is corrected to align with Jones’s theory.
C
Researchers in the scientist’s field are more likely to pursue lines of research that they expect will favor theories they accept than to pursue other lines of research.
It doesn’t matter what researchers expect ahead of time. We need to know why their data-corrections align with Jones’s theory.
D
Even if researchers fail to detect errors in a data-collection process when they examine the data that they collected, that does not guarantee that no such errors exist.
This may be true, but why do researchers mainly detect errors that are then corrected to bring data in line with Jones’s theory? This doesn’t tell us enough about the data-correction process.
E
Researchers in the scientist’s field have formulated several other theories that attempt to explain the same range of phenomena that Jones’s theory attempts to explain.
Why do data-corrections favor Jones’s theory rather than these other theories? If anything, this only complicates things since we now know there are other theories to choose from.