The Truth campaign has been working for decades to end smoking. Their efforts are laudable, but their methods may need some cleaning up. Recently, Truth has latched on to the idea that smokers make less money at their jobs because they smoke. Their idea is dramatized vividly by their “Squadless” add campaign which juxtaposes a lonely individual smoker with a group of people going to a fun concert. Truth trots out some important sounding figures on their website. At one point citing the Bureau of labor statistics to point out a “wage gap” between smokers and non-smokers. Other sources include Even One is Too Much: The Economic Consequences of Being a Smoker a working paper published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta outlining a causal link between smoking and lower wages. (Hotchkiss, 2013) While I don’t purport myself to be an expert in the field of Economics, I have been educated in the social Sciences and I am well prepared to analyze a piece of scholarly work.
When I read Even One is too Much, I found it to be well researched in its field, but found it lacking as well. It contained, to my eye, contradictory information regarding its conclusions. On the one hand, it does mention educational achievement as a key difference between smokers and non-smokers. At the same time, it holds onto the assertion that “even one cigarette is enough to trigger a smoking wage differential.” The central issue I have with this article is that it fails to account for the possibility that smoking is a symptom of lower wages and lower educational achievement than a cause. It feels like the authors failed to think critically in their work, merely writing an extension of previous research rather than questioning how things like educational attainment could act as a confounding variable in their study.
The core of my concern is with our academic culture’s trend towards giving large incentives to novel publication, which can lead to a system in which established elements are left unquestioned. I understand that academic research must march forward to keep up with an ever-changing world, but there must be space for research to fulfill its promise of self-correction. In many ways, there is a glaring need for a rebirth of research methodology in academia. We seem to have forgotten the importance of confirmation focused research, always focusing on the next big discovery to make headlines and careers. What we need in academics is a space for researchers to question and retool current research. I would envision this space as an intensive peer review process. Where researchers can sit down and create confirmatory studies for newer and older pieces of work.
Of course, the need for deeper and more critical scrutiny of our knowledge is not simply restricted to the academic world. In the age of social media and the internet, we are all in need of a deeper and more critical look at the things we read and believe. I know fact checking is never easy. In some cases, like the Truth campaign, cursory research will yield promising results. When we uncover those easy results, we must dig deeper and scrutinize the data behind the information we are being presented. This is the essence of critical thought.
