Conflict of Interest Mitigation Procedures May Have Little Influence on the Perceived Procedural Fairness of Risk‐Related Research

Abstract

Two between-subject experiments explored perceived conflict of interest (COI)-operationalized as perceived procedural unfairness-in a hypothetical public-private research partnership to study the health risks of trans fats. Perceived fairness was measured as subjects' perceptions that health researchers would be willing to listen to a range of voices and minimize bias (i.e., COI) in the context of a research project. Experiment 1 (n = 1,263) randomly assigned research subjects to a partnership that included (1) a combination of an industry partner, a university partner, and a nongovernmental organization (NGO) partner; and (2) one of three processes aimed at mitigating the potential for COI to harm the quality of the research. The procedures included an arm's-length process meant to keep the university-based research team from being influenced by the other partners, an independent advisory board to oversee the project, and a commitment to making all data and analyses openly available. The results suggest that having an industry partner has substantial negative effects on perceived fairness and that the benefit of employing a single COI-mitigation process may be relatively small. Experiment 2 (n = 1,076) assessed a partnership of (1) a university and either an NGO or industry partner and (b) zero, one, two, or three of the three COI-mitigation procedures. Results suggest there is little value in combining COI-mitigation procedures. The study has implications for those who aim to foster confidence in scientific findings for which the underlying research may benefit from industry funding.

Americans’ views of scientists’ motivations for scientific work

“…Finally, these findings suggesting a generally positive attitude among Americans toward scientists’ work motivations do not resolve the apparent discrepancy which motivated this study. Qualitative, survey, and experimental data point to potential self-interest or employer self-interest, such as “follow the money!” as a salient issue for laypeople (see Besley et al, 2017, 2019; Johnson, 2019a; Maxim and Mansier, 2014), while interest cues generally perform poorly in predicting the perceived relative validity of disputing scientific positions in both survey self-reports and experiments (e.g. Johnson, 2019a, 2019b).…”

Open Science in regulatory environmental risk assessment

“…It may help to increase trust in these cofunded studies if the research projects are made transparent and results, including all underlying data, are made available in open access publications. However, some evidence indicates that it is difficult to mitigate the lack of public trust associated with private-sector funding, even with transparency initiatives (Besley et al, 2017(Besley et al, , 2019.…”