The Motivation

Studies don’t just happen without a reason. There’s a whole industry dominated by politics. Scientific politics, that is. Thing is, in order to receive a grant to conduct a real study, you need funds. However, you can obtain funds by publishing papers. The more of a wow factor you give to your study, the more free publicity you get, the higher the chances of obtaining a grant to study something actually useful.

However, things are more complicated than this. Sometimes, lucky scientists stumble upon findings while researching data for entirely different things. These random findings usually give birth to sensational news like the one we’re reporting today.

Other times they just have the result in mind and manipulate the data to prove a point. This is the bad part of science, but it does exist and, unfortunately, it happens more often than naught.

After all this, one would wonder: how did this study happened? What’s the purpose behind it? Who funded this? Was this study financed by anti-parachute lobbyists?

All jokes and snarkiness aside, we shouldn’t rush to blame the scientists for their faulty methodology. This study is actually symptomatic of a modern climate that finds easy, poppy, trivia-like science facts appealing.

And in order to survive, scientists were forced to adapt to this reality in order to ensure funding for their more serious projects. That’s why for every groundbreaking study that makes a real contribution to the field of science, there are ten praising the incredible benefits of kiwis or something along those lines.