Science Failure

Failure is essential to science. Experimentation and exploration are the core elements of research. These fundamentals are taught to our children in their first school science lessons.

It is paradoxical that, while failed studies are just as important for the advancement of knowledge as successful studies, scientific articles always present positive results. When did you last read an article about “Hey we spent a lot of money and time on this study, but we could not find any significant findings”? This positive-results bias is a massive issue within the scientific community (some fields are worse than others). Researchers are more likely to submit and editors are more likely to accept positive results than negative or inconclusive results. For knowledge to grow, we need to be able to read about experiments and studies gone wrong, statistically insignificant results and all the other interesting research that do not get published.

For example, if a study is testing whether a new drug is effective in reducing headaches, a null result would mean the study found no difference between people who took the drug and those who didn't. A negative result might indicate that not only did the drug fail to reduce headaches, but perhaps it even made them worse.

Therefore, while these results might seem disappointing, negative and null results are extremely important for science. They help avoid wasted efforts and resources on ineffective treatments or incorrect theories. They also contribute to a fuller understanding of the subject by showing what doesn’t work or what isn’t true, which can be as valuable as discovering what does work. However, these types of results are underreported because they not exciting or deemed less interesting.

In collaboration with Journal of Trial and Error, and their science writer Marcel Hobma, we developed a new exhibition theme focused on failure in science.