Science bubbles

Ever since the financial crisis in 2008, researchers all over the world have been studying what makes people make irrational choices and expect far too much of their unrealistic investments. In other words: what makes bubbles grow as they do? Financial bubbles have been around for as long as the market economy has existed. Just think of the Dutch bubble on the tulip market in the 17th century. The Wall Street Crash in 1929. The Japanese housing bubble in the 1980s. And the IT bubble in the 1990s. Each period has its own particular markets that can swell up like a bubble.

In a new article in the journal called Philosophy & Technology,we show that the same thing can happen today in the world of research. Research and science are normally regarded as rational activities that are controlled by rules about reliability, objectivity and academic criticism. But the trend for particular fashions in the funding system, new reward structures at our universities and the uniformity of research topics are helping to undermine standard academic principles – and at worst they could create bubbles like those from which the financial market has suffered.

Bubbles can only develop if two specific conditions are present. Too much liquidity focusing on too few investments on the one hand. And the presence of speculators on the other. A number of mechanisms are incorporated into universities and research institutions to exclude such speculators. Peer reviews and mutual criticism, for instance. But now there is a new trend: a lot of the funding for research is concentrated on a few trendy research themes. Human biotechnology and artificial intelligence, for instance. And now neuroscience. What these areas share is that they receive huge amounts of funding based on expectations regarding future breakthroughs.

These days, neuroscience is a matter of international politics. Take last year’s investments in the US and Europe, for instance. Earlier this year President Obama launched the Brain Map project with a total funding framework in excess of one billion dollars. And the EU Commission adopted the Human Blue Brain project with a funding framework of 500 million Euros. The media are full of stories about new research into neuropedagogics, neuroethics and neuroaesthetics. These are all areas of the arts which are currently being taken over by neuroscience.

There are plenty of good reasons to encourage cross-disciplinarity and equal collaboration. But when you combine the neuro wave with massive investments, some researchers may start (either consciously or unconsciously) to make their research seem more interesting and promising than it actually is. A number of studies have shown that both academics and laymen attribute more importance to psychological phenomena, for instance, if they include neuroscientific data. Even though this data is irrelevant for their explanation in terms of logic and content.

Our scepticism is not targeted at neuroscience. But we would like to start a discussion of whether the new market-driven reward structures and financial instruments in research (bibliometric points, rankings, measuring productivity in terms of the number of full-time students) could eventually lead to bubble tendencies because the traditional incentives such as academic recognition and organised criticism are slowly being replaced by competition and rapid results. This could mean that researchers are no longer interested in dealing with topics that can’t be published, and that they may be tempted to describe their hypotheses in ways which appeal to grant givers and peers in research councils and journals.

David Budtz Pedersen is the project manager of the research project called Humanomics: Mapping the Humanities, Aarhus University.

Read more: Budtz Pedersen, D. & Hendricks, V.F. 2013. Science Bubbles. In: Philosophy & Technology (Springer). Online 23 November 2013.

Translated by Nicholas Wrigley