Cargo cult science is a term invented by Richard Feynman to describe research that is conducted experimentally and appears to be scientific, but produces results of questionable significance due to nonscientific factors like expediency or institutional bias. Feynman introduced the phrase in a speech at Caltech in 1974 that was reproduced in the book Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! : Adventures of a Curious Character (Norton, 1985) and on many web sites. He based the phrase on an existing concept in anthropology, the cargo cult. Feynman cautioned that to avoid becoming cargo cult scientists, researchers must be willing to doubt results and to investigate possible flaws in an experiment.
An example of cargo cult science would be any experiment in which another researcher's results are used in lieu of an experimental control. Since the other researcher's conditions might differ from those of the present experiment in unknown ways, differences in the outcome might be unrelated to the variable under consideration.
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