In 2011, Petroc Sumner of Cardiff University and his colleagues published a brain imaging study with a provocative result: Healthy men who have low levels of a certain chemical in a specific area of their brains tend to get high scores on tests of impulsivity.
When the paper came out, thousands of people across England were rioting because a policeman had shot a young black man. “We never saw the connection, but of course the press immediately saw the connection,” Sumner recalls. Brain chemical lack ‘spurs rioting’, blared one headline.Rioters have ‘lower levels’ of brain chemical that keeps impulsive behaviour under control, said another.
“At the time, like most scientists, we kind of instinctively blamed the journalists for this,” Sumner says. His team called out these (shameful, really) exaggerations in The Guardian, and started engaging in debates about science and the media. “We quickly began to realize that everyone was arguing on the basis of anecdote and personal experience, but not evidence. So we decided to back off, stop arguing, and start collecting data.”
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And the data, published today in BMJ, surprised Sumner. His team found that more than one-third of academic press releases contain exaggerated claims. What’s more, when a study is accompanied by an exaggerated press release, it’s more likely to be hyped in the press.
Read full, original article: The Power of a Press Release
