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this post was submitted on 21 May 2025
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There is no such thing as an impartial sponsor; some are more obviously biased than others, but the belief in a fictitious impartiality is part of the problem. It shouldn't take a meta-study for people to see am obvious conflict of interest.
I'm biased. You are biased. Everyone is biased.
What if the sponsor is the blanket university funding for a professor's research? It may have some bias, but there is no steak in the actual result.
I expect to see "these results call for more research on the topic", but that's pretty much it.
stake?
Accepting funding from sponsors responsible for pollution & publishing environmental toxicology studies that disfavor those sponsors was pretty common at the university medical office where I worked.
I guess I didn't communicate my point effectively. I wasn't trying to nitpick semantics. I was trying to say that people don't think critically because they assume impartiality.
If the first thing people did when they looked at a study was to ask what possible biases or conflicts of interest the sponsors have, then conducting a meta-study concluding that biased studies are biased wouldn't be news to anyone.