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Asked by virtnack to David, Luna, Mark, Melanie, Probash on 21 Mar 2011 in Categories: Scientist.
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David Pyle answered on 20 Mar 2011:
As a physical scientist, I would say usually not. As a geologist, though, you have to be really careful when making observations to try and record what is actually there – as there is a strong tendency otherwise to only record the things you ‘expect’ to see, based on your feelings about what you think is going on!
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Mark Vesey answered on 20 Mar 2011:
An experiments outcomes depends on the inputs, you must do something differently to affect it so simply teh way you are feeling shouldn’t make any difference to the findings.
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Melanie Stefan answered on 20 Mar 2011:
Yes, it totally could!
That’s why it is very important to plan the experiment carefully in order to minimise those risks. For instance, if I expect a drug to have a certain effect on cells, I might (unconsciously) look for that effect more thoroughly in cells that have been treated than in untreated cells. So I might pick it up in treated cells, but not in untreated cells. One way to go about this would be to have somebody else label my samples such that when I am looking at them, I don’t know which cells are treated and which ones are untreated. Or I could let somebody else check the cells under the microscope without telling them what it is I’m looking for. Or I might take pictures of the cells and let a computer analyse the images in order to rule out human bias.
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Luna Munoz answered on 21 Mar 2011:
Yes, definitely!! I will respond to your question differently depending on my mood 😉
People will respond differently if you ran an experiment on different days. This is why scientists are willing to accept a degree of chance in their data. So, when I find that one group in my experiment outperforms another group, I will only state that they are different when the difference is beyond a 95% probability of it happening outside of chance occurrences (like someone just happens to be in a bad mood). Also, many of my experiments have more than 100 people participating, so that summarizing across all the people, you can manage chance occurrences.
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