• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

Dietitians for Professional Integrity

  • Home
  • Our Team
  • Resources
    • Advocacy & Action Toolkit
    • Conflict-Free CEUs
    • Distinguished Dietitians
    • Ethical Sponsorship
    • FNCE Guides & Reports
    • Like-Minded Organizations
    • RD Resource Toolkit
    • Statements of Concern
    • Understand The Issues
  • Contact
  • FAQ
  • Blog
  • Donate
  • Search

Jan 06, 2017 Leave a Comment

A Must-Read! What Neuroscience Says About Conflicts of Interest

In 2007, the Association of American Medical Colleges and the Neuroscience and Computational Psychiatry Unit at Baylor College of Medicine hosted a symposium titled “The Scientific Basis of Influence and Reciprocity.”

The event presented a wide array of psychological research on influence and tied it to issues of conflicts of interest and subconscious bias in research and academia.

The symposium’s content are available as a 47-page PDF document, which we highly recommend you add to your library.

Highlights:

  • “[In this experiment], ‘sponsorship’ meant that an agent (here a fictitious company) had contributed the subject reimbursement money used to carry out the experiment. At the beginning of the experiment, each subject is exposed to the company’s logo, this sponsorship information, and the amount of money the company is contributing to subject reimbursement for the experiment. The sponsor’s logo was transiently flashed close to the different paintings. The mere presence of the sponsoring logo near a painting changed the passive brain responses  to that painting and positively influenced the subject’s preference rating for the painting.”
  • “[This experiment] suggested that valuation is affected even if there is no monetary gift at all. The moment you touch the valuation system with a gift or favor, things begin to change.”
  • “All of this research suggests that physicians who will personally benefit from recommending a particular drug, treatment, procedure, or clinical trial will have no problem figuring out ways to justify that decision as being in their patients’ interest.”DFPI ADDS: This, too, applies to health professionals who communicate messaging that is more aligned with producers of unhealthy fare than with public health messaging.
  • “People have the wrong psychological model of conflict of interest; they believe that succumbing to conflicts of interest is a matter of conscious corruption, whereas unconscious bias is a far more serious problem.”
  • “Though disclosure theoretically levels the playing field, in fact it does not really eliminate the problem and may make it worse. Disclosure may give the adviser a ‘moral license’ for strategic exaggeration in the adviser’s best interest. Having disclosed a conflict of interest, moreover, advisors may feel compelled to give advice in an extra-forceful fashion.”

Share this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)

Related

Categories: Academic Research, Industry-Funded Research, Problematic Sponsorship, Recommended Reads Tags: bias, conflicts of interest, industry-funded research

Reader Interactions

Leave a Comment Cancel

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

sidebar

Blog Sidebar

Social Media

FacebookTwitter

Subscribe to receive our quarterly newsletter and other breaking news!

  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Browse by Topic

  • Academic Research
  • Advocacy
  • Distinguished Dietitians
  • Ethical Sponsorship
  • Industry Spin
  • Industry-Funded Research
  • Interviews
  • Photos
  • Problematic Sponsorship
  • Recommended Reads
  • Reports
  • Statements of Concern
  • Uncategorized

Tags

Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics American Beverage Association Andy Bellatti Big Tobacco California Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics Center for Science in the Public Interest CEUs Civil Eats Coca-Cola ConAgra conflicts of interest Corn Refiners Association FNCE front groups General Mills Global Energy Balance Network Hershey's industry-funded research junk food Kellogg Kids Eat Right Kraft Kraft Singles lobbying Marion Nestle marketing marketing to children Mars McDonald's meat industry Michele Simon moderation National Dairy Council Nestlé New York Times PepsiCo policy soda soda tax soda taxes sugar The Sugar Association Unilever World Health Organization Yoni Freedhoff

Footer

Subscribe to receive our quarterly newsletter and other breaking news!

  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Recent Posts

Farewell to Our Supporters

Dear DFPI Supporters, Since February of 2013, we at Dietitians For Professional Integrity have been a voice for uplifting the registered dietitian credential at a time when corporate influences - both overt and covert Read More

Highly Processed Foods Can Negatively Impact Health

Good read from New York Times on how highly processed foods (and the ingredients in many of them) can negatively impact health by creating an imbalance in the gut microbiome. This is the future of nutrition. The fact Read More

Social Media

FacebookTwitter

RSS

  • RSS - Posts

© 2021 Dietitians for Professional Integrity