Techniques · Framing and omission

Manufactured doubt

Presenting a settled question as an open one by amplifying uncertainty, funding contrary studies, and demanding a standard of proof no evidence can meet, so that action is delayed without any claim ever being disproved.

Family Framing and omission First documented 1969 Exploits Status quo bias, Ambiguity effect Related fallacy Appeal to ignorance
How it works

Doubt does not need to win. It needs to keep the argument going. A public that believes a question is unresolved will not support acting on it, and manufactured doubt supplies that belief by every available means: the single contrary study, the credentialed skeptic, the call for "more research," the observation that science is never final. Each move is individually reasonable, and together they produce paralysis.

The strategy was set out in an internal tobacco-industry memo in 1969, "Doubt is our product, since it is the best means of competing with the 'body of fact' that exists in the mind of the general public," and it has since been applied to acid rain, ozone, lead, sugar, and climate, often by the same people. It trades on the audience's reasonable habit of withholding judgment when experts appear to disagree. Exploits Status Quo Bias and Ambiguity Effect.

Historical examples

1954–1998 · tobacco industry

The industry's Frank Statement of 1954 promised independent research and created the Tobacco Industry Research Committee, whose function, a Brown & Williamson memo put it in 1969, was doubt. For four decades the industry funded studies, cultivated skeptics, and called for more research while its own scientists had accepted the link between smoking and cancer. The 1998 Master Settlement Agreement dissolved the research bodies.

Brandt, Allan M. The Cigarette Century. New York: Basic Books, 2007; Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corporation, "Smoking and Health Proposal," 1969, Truth Tobacco Industry Documents, University of California San Francisco. Source

1980s–2000s · acid rain, ozone, climate

Oreskes and Conway showed that a small group of physicists who had worked on tobacco moved on to dispute the science of acid rain, the ozone hole, second-hand smoke, and climate change, using the same methods and in several cases the same institutes. The continuity of personnel is the strongest evidence that the doubt was a product rather than a finding.

Oreskes, Naomi, and Erik M. Conway. Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. New York: Bloomsbury, 2010.

In advertising and commerce

1960s–1990s · sugar

Documents uncovered in 2016 showed that the Sugar Research Foundation paid Harvard researchers in the 1960s to produce a review that emphasized dietary fat and treated the evidence on sugar as inconclusive; later industry reviews repeated the framing. The question of sugar and heart disease was kept "open" for decades by the party with the most to lose from its closing.

Kearns, Cristin E., Laura A. Schmidt, and Stanton A. Glantz. "Sugar Industry and Coronary Heart Disease Research: A Historical Analysis of Internal Industry Documents." JAMA Internal Medicine 176, no. 11 (2016): 1680–1685. Source

Classroom prompt

Find a current headline that says a question is "still debated." Who is doing the debating, and what do they say would settle it?

In the wild

Short examples of the technique at work, each with what to notice. The same examples are questions in the quiz, where the answer is not given away.

1
"Some scientists say the link is proven. Others aren't so sure. Until the experts agree, it seems premature to act."

What to notice. No competing explanation is offered; the only move is to keep the question open and delay.

2
"We simply need more research before anyone can responsibly say." The speaker's trade group funds none.

What to notice. A call for research from a party whose interest is in the research never concluding.

3
"The report admits its own margin of error is significant, so who really knows?"

What to notice. Ordinary scientific uncertainty is presented as ignorance, and "who really knows" closes the question.

Sources

  1. Oreskes, Naomi, and Erik M. Conway. Merchants of Doubt. New York: Bloomsbury, 2010. ISBN 978-1596916104
  2. Michaels, David. Doubt Is Their Product: How Industry's Assault on Science Threatens Your Health. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. ISBN 978-0195300673
  3. Proctor, Robert N. Golden Holocaust. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. ISBN 978-0520270169
  4. Kearns, Cristin E., Laura A. Schmidt, and Stanton A. Glantz. "Sugar Industry and Coronary Heart Disease Research." JAMA Internal Medicine 176, no. 11 (2016): 1680–1685. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2016.5394