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Funding Bias

When the company paying for the study is the same company selling the product, guess which way the results lean.

This isn't a theory. It's been measured. Meta-analyses consistently show that industry-funded studies are significantly more likely to produce results favourable to the sponsor. Drug trials funded by pharmaceutical companies find their drugs effective at far higher rates than independently funded trials of the same drugs. The same pattern appears in nutrition research funded by food companies, environmental studies funded by polluters, and safety research funded by chemical manufacturers.

The manipulation is rarely crude. Nobody needs to fake data when you can design the study to favour your product. Compare your drug to a placebo instead of to the best existing treatment. Use doses of the competitor that are too low to work. Measure outcomes at the time point where your drug looks best. Run multiple trials and publish only the favourable ones. Each choice is technically defensible. Together, they stack the deck.

The system depends on your assumption that "a study showed" is a neutral statement. It isn't. Who paid for the study, who designed it, and who controlled the data matter just as much as the results themselves. Next time you see research cited to sell a product, ask who funded it. The answer is usually available. Most people just never look.

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