Harvard launches program to fund contrarian science research

Science moves forward when someone is willing to be wrong in public. Harvard's Institute for Quantitative Social Science just created a program to help that happen.

The Extraordinary Claims, Extraordinary Evidence (ECEE) initiative funds tenure-track researchers pursuing ideas that most of their peers think are misguided, offensive, or just plain wacky. The catch: you need rigorous evidence to back them up.

"Science depends upon contrarians," said Gary King, director of IQSS. "We need researchers trying to propose claims that most others think are wacky or wrong or offensive or ridiculous, because sometimes rigorous evidence will convince us all that they're right."

The program, named after a Carl Sagan quote, does something simple but radical: it removes the practical barriers to testing unpopular ideas. Researchers get help securing funding, accessing datasets, running statistical analyses, and visualizing findings. They get workspace. They get support. What they don't get is scrutiny from colleagues who might kill the project before it starts.

That confidentiality is deliberate. King noted that IQSS keeps silent about which faculty are using ECEE. "Total confidentiality, combined with the extraordinary research support we're offering, helps faculty to take risks on highly contrarian projects," he said.

One team decided to go public with their findings. Psychologist Richard McNally and his co-authors studied whether trigger warnings and "safe space" designations actually help students when they encounter potentially traumatic material. The results were nuanced enough to survive scrutiny from skeptics on both sides.

They found trigger warnings had no measurable effect on how students responded to difficult content. Safe space language, though, did increase feelings of safety and willingness to discuss controversial topics — but it also made students perceive their professors as more "left-wing authoritarian." None of this was obvious beforehand. The team conducted careful experiments and detailed interviews with over 800 students.

"What the authors were able to do was turn a highly politicized topic into an evidence-based analysis," said Steven Worthington, IQSS director of data science. "Our role was to help ensure that the evidence was strong enough that even skeptics would take it seriously."

McNally acknowledged the program made the work possible at that scale. Without institutional support and resources, the study would have been smaller, less rigorous, easier to dismiss.

The program is open to faculty at every career stage. Its real contribution isn't just money or data — it's permission. Permission to explore ideas that might fail. Permission to publish findings that contradict your own assumptions. Permission to be wrong, as long as you're wrong carefully.