We have all seen the thousands of cutely named "scientific" articles. They have names like "Chocolate makes you live longer!" or "1-2 glasses of wine a night will improve your heart health!". Some of them can be tracked back to an article that actually happened, but the results are rarely ever what the fake title implies. Often times it's impossible to find the source article it comes from because whoever publishes the story fail to include the source. These sorts of article are propagated by all kinds social media, news stations, and basically anyone preaching to those gullible enough to not question it.
You might be asking yourself "But Drew, if these misleading articles come from real scientific studies, why are they so inaccurate?" Essentially what can happen is a long game of telephone, or Chinese whispers. In telephone, you form a line of people, and then create a phrase, lets say our phrase "a red fox jumps the fence." One person starts by whispering the phrase in the ear of the person next to them, and so on until the phrase reaches the last person in line. By the end of the game the phrase has completely changed: "a dead fox forgets the rents." The game is typically used to teach elementary school students not to spread rumors, but what can we really expect from Buzzfeed, Huffington Post, and NowThis.
What can also happen is that the "scientific" study isn't legitimate. There are a ton of things that the researchers can do to bend the results to reach a certain means. They can cherry-pick variables out of the study so that the results start to look like their hypothesis, this is called data dredging. There are many things that can discredit a study, for example, the study may say "Liberals are more likely to cry than conservatives" but if only 20 people are surveyed it doesn't accurately depict the entire population. Not only does the sample size matter, the saple has to be randomized to refrain from developing any bias. If you survey how many Republicans are voting for Donald Trump and 86 percent say they're voting for him you can't really say "86 percent of people polled are voting for Donald Trump."
These are just a few ways "researchers" will bend the results and change the final outcome of the study. Next time you see a study telling you that marijuana will cure cancer keep these things in mind. Companies and political leaders will pay a lot of money to win people over with "science." There are some pretty awful people out there, who are willing to lie to the world just to get some extra shares. Take everything you read with a grain of alt (even this), question everything, do your own research, from real scientific journals.
