Of course there's the usual shenanigans re: funding, but anecdotally it seems like most people are "bought off" (or coerced) by their colleagues or their selves, and the payment is career success and social approval.
For example: No grad student will invalidate their adviser's career. Very few people challenge the veracity of ubiquitous model systems or paradigms ("measuring $this means $that"). Results are sometimes tailored to be visually appealing. Unexpected results are discarded. The meaning of results can be overstated. An experiment can be set up which is internally perfect but which relies on completely nonsensical assumptions to inform its relation to salient natural phenomena. Etc.
To behave that way is to be a "bad citizen", make trouble for people, lose friends, and never get ahead. And practically speaking, most people who challenge prevailing wisdom are noob grad students who don't even know how wrong they are.
Of course, this happens to varying degrees in different fields. For materials chemistry of steel, it's pretty obvious when the tensile strength is less than reported. For organic synthesis, many published syntheses are bullshit but it's still obvious if a chemical isn't what it should be. For psychology and some of the newer theoretical disciplines (thinking of one rockstar "network scientist" here!), social consensus carries more weight than "reality" because reality is so tricky to measure.
Of course there's the usual shenanigans re: funding, but anecdotally it seems like most people are "bought off" (or coerced) by their colleagues or their selves, and the payment is career success and social approval.
For example: No grad student will invalidate their adviser's career. Very few people challenge the veracity of ubiquitous model systems or paradigms ("measuring $this means $that"). Results are sometimes tailored to be visually appealing. Unexpected results are discarded. The meaning of results can be overstated. An experiment can be set up which is internally perfect but which relies on completely nonsensical assumptions to inform its relation to salient natural phenomena. Etc.
To behave that way is to be a "bad citizen", make trouble for people, lose friends, and never get ahead. And practically speaking, most people who challenge prevailing wisdom are noob grad students who don't even know how wrong they are.
Of course, this happens to varying degrees in different fields. For materials chemistry of steel, it's pretty obvious when the tensile strength is less than reported. For organic synthesis, many published syntheses are bullshit but it's still obvious if a chemical isn't what it should be. For psychology and some of the newer theoretical disciplines (thinking of one rockstar "network scientist" here!), social consensus carries more weight than "reality" because reality is so tricky to measure.