All too often the popular press will jump on a scientific result and shout its praises. On the surface, this is great. The scientists get exposure. The people get knowledge. What could be wrong with that?
Well, it turns out that 99% of the time journalists seem to avoid the dirty work of reading the paper that describes the research in question and simply go for the abstract. Then, they often take one choice sentence from the abstract and extrapolate from there. This, of course, leads to conclusions which are not supported by the data.
Although the most recent example I came across isn’t necessarily an example of this type of journalism, it has the same flavor. This is an interview in Time magazine of Daniel Kripke, co-director of research at the Scripps Clinic Sleep Center in La Jolla, Calif.
The article suggests that those people who sleep between 6.5 and 7.5 hours live the longest and those who sleep less than 6.5 or more than 7.5 have a higher likelihood of dieing early. On the surface, this is terrible for me. I routinely sleep 8 - 8.5 hours per night. I guess I’m already a corpse? Of course, those of you that read the entire article will notice that Dr. Kripke acknoledges that this relationship is NOT CAUSAL. Did you get that? It’s not that sleeping more leads to early death. It’s that, for whatever reason, people who sleep longer also die younger. It does not mean that if I sleep 1 fewer hour I will live longer!
Now, the good news is that this was at least mentioned in the article…but not till pretty far into it. Most people just read the headline and the first paragraph, a dangerous practice. If I took this seriously (as I’m sure many people will), I might uproot my life based on the belief that I’m sleeping too much.
Journalists needs to get some stronger ethical standards when it comes to presenting scientific research and acknowledge things like correlation <> causation early on. Defusing these types of misconceptions will surely lead to a more informed citizenry.
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