Not-
Popper concluded that it is impossible to know that a theory is true based on observations ( O ); science can tell us only that the theory is false (or that it has yet to be refuted). He concluded that meaningful scientific statements are falsifiable.
Scientific theories may not be this simple. We often base our theories on a set of auxiliary assumptions which we take as postulates for our theories. For example, a theory for liquid dynamics might depend on the whole of classical mechanics being taken as a postulate, or a theory of viral genetics might depend on the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium. In these cases, classical mechanics (or the Hardy-Wienberg equilibrium) are the auxiliary assumptions for our specific theories.
These auxiliary assumptions can help show that science is often not a deductively valid exercise. The Quine-Duhem thesis 3 recovers the symmetry between falsification and verification when we take into account the role of the auxiliary assumptions ( AA ) of the theory ( T ):
If ( and , then Not- | If ( and , then |
Not- | |
Deductively Invalid | Deductively Invalid |
That is, if the predicted observation ( O ) turns out to be false, we can deduce only that something is wrong with the conjunction, ( T and AA ); we cannot determine from the premises that it is T rather than AA that is false. In order to recover the asymmetry, we would need our assumptions ( AA ) to be independently verifiable:
If ( and , then Not- | If ( and , then |
Not- | |
Deductively Valid | Deductively Invalid |
Falsifying a theory requires that auxiliary assumption ( AA ) be demonstrably true. Auxiliary assumptions are often highly theoretical — remember, auxiliary assumptions might be statements like the entirety of classical mechanics is correct or the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium is valid ! It is important to note, that if we can’t verify AA , we will not be able to falsify T by using the valid argument above. Contrary to Popper, there really is no asymmetry between falsification and verification. If we cannot verify theoretical statements, then we cannot falsify them either.
Since verifying a theoretical statement is nearly impossible, and falsification often requires verification of assumptions, where does that leave scientific theories? What is required of a statement to make it scientific?
Carl Hempel came up with one of the more useful statements about the properties of scientific theories: 4 “The statements constituting a scientific explanation must be capable of empirical test.” And this statement about what exactly it means to be scientific brings us right back to things that scientists are very good at: experimentation and experimental design. If I propose a scientific explanation for a phenomenon, it should be possible to subject that theory to an empirical test or experiment. We should also have a reasonable expectation of universality of empirical tests. That is multiple independent (skeptical) scientists should be able to subject these theories to similar tests in different locations, on different equipment, and at different times and get similar answers. Reproducibility of scientific experiments is therefore going to be required for universality.
So to answer some of the questions we might have about reproducibility:
If theory and experiment are the two traditional legs of science, simulation is fast becoming the “third leg”. Modern science has come to rely on computer simulations, computational models, and computational analysis of very large data sets. These methods for doing science are all reproducible in principle . For very simple systems, and small data sets this is nearly the same as reproducible in practice . As systems become more complex and the data sets become large, calculations that are reproducible in principle are no longer reproducible in practice without public access to the code (or data). If a scientist makes a claim that a skeptic can only reproduce by spending three decades writing and debugging a complex computer program that exactly replicates the workings of a commercial code, the original claim is really only reproducible in principle. If we really want to allow skeptics to test our claims, we must allow them to see the workings of the computer code that was used. It is therefore imperative for skeptical scientific inquiry that software for simulating complex systems be available in source-code form and that real access to raw data be made available to skeptics.
Our position on open source and open data in science was arrived at when an increasing number of papers began crossing our desks for review that could not be subjected to reproducibility tests in any meaningful way. Paper A might have used a commercial package that comes with a license that forbids people at university X from viewing the code ! 6
Paper 2 might use a code which requires parameter sets that are “trade secrets” and have never been published in the scientific literature . Our view is that it is not healthy for scientific papers to be supported by computations that cannot be reproduced except by a few employees at a commercial software developer. Should this kind of work even be considered Science? It may be research , and it may be important , but unless enough details of the experimental methodology are made available so that it can be subjected to true reproducibility tests by skeptics, it isn’t Science.
Pingback: pligg.com
“If we cannot verify theoretical statements, then we cannot falsify them either.
Since verifying a theoretical statement is nearly impossible, and falsification often requires verification of assumptions…”
An invalid argument is invalid regardless of the truth of the premises. I would suggest that an hypothesis based on unverifiable assumptions could be ‘falsified’ the same way an argument with unverifiable premises could be shown to be invalid. Would you not agree?
“Falsifying a theory requires that auxiliary assumption (AA) be demonstrably true.”
No, it only requires them to be true.
In the falisificationist method, you can change the AA so long as that increases the theories testability. (the theory includes AA and the universal statement, btw) . In your second box you misrepresent the first derivation. in the conclusion it would be ¬(t and AA). after that you can either modify the AA (as long as it increase the theories falsifiability) or abandon the theory. Therefore you do not need the third box, it explains something that does not need explaining, or that could be explained more concisely and without error by reconstructing the process better. This process is always tentative and open to re-evaluation (that is the risky and critical nature of conjectures and refutations). Falsificationism does not pretend conclusiveness, it abandoned that to the scrap heap along with the hopelessly defective interpretation of science called inductivism.
“Contrary to Popper, there really is no asymmetry between falsification and verification. If we cannot verify theoretical statements, then we cannot falsify them either.” There is an asymmetry. You cannot refute the asymmetry by showing that falsification is not conclusive. Because the asymmetry is a logical relationship between statements. What you would have shown, if your argument was valid or accurate, would be that falsification is not possible in practice. Not that the asymmetry is false.
Popper wanted to replace induction and verification with deduction and falsification.
He held that a theory that was once accepted but which, thanks to a novel experiment or observation, turns out to be false, confronts us with a new problem, to which new solutions are needed. In his view, this process is the hallmark of scientific progress.
Surprisingly, Popper failed to note that, despite his efforts to present it as deductive, this process is at bottom inductive, since it assumes that a theory falsified today will remain falsified tomorrow.
Accepting that swans are either white or black because a black one has been spotted rests on the assumption that there are other black swans around and that the newly discovered black one will not become white at a later stage. It is obvious but also inductive thinking in the sense that they project the past into the future, that is, extrapolate particulars into a universal.
In other words, induction, the process that Popper was determined to avoid, lies at the heart of his philosophy of science as he defined it.
Despite positivism’s limitations, science is positive or it is not science : positive science’s theories are maybe incapable of demonstration (as Hume wrote of causation), but there are not others available.
If it is impossible to demonstrate that fire burns, putting one’s hand in it is just too painful.
Pingback: House of Eratosthenes
Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *
In order to continue enjoying our site, we ask that you confirm your identity as a human. Thank you very much for your cooperation.
The scientific method is defined as the steps scientists follow to create a view of the world that is accurate, reliable, and consistent. It’s also a way of minimizing how a scientist’s cultural and personal beliefs impact and influence their work. It attempts to make a person’s perceptions and interpretations of nature and natural phenomena as scientific and neutral as possible. It minimizes the amount of prejudice and bias a scientist has on the results of an experiment, hypothesis, or theory.
The scientific method can be broken down into four steps:
If the results of these experiments support the hypothesis, then it may become a theory or even a law of nature. However, if they do not support the hypothesis, then it either has to be changed or completely rejected. The main benefit of the scientific method is that it has predictive power—a proven theory can be applied to a wide range of phenomena. Of course, even the most tested theory may be, at some point, proven wrong because new observations may be recorded or experiments done that contradict it. Theories can never fully be proven, only fully disproven.
Testing a hypothesis can lead to one of two things: the hypothesis is confirmed or the hypothesis is rejected, meaning it either has to be changed or a new hypothesis has to be created. This must happen if the experiments repeatedly and clearly show that their hypothesis is wrong. It doesn’t matter how elegant or supported a theory is—if it can be disproven once, it can’t be considered a law of nature. Experimentation is the supreme rule in the scientific method, and if an experiment shows that the hypothesis isn’t true, it trumps all previous experiments that supported it. These experiments sometimes directly test the theory, while other times they test the theory indirectly via logic and math. The scientific method requires that all theories have to be testable in some way—those that can’t are not considered scientific theories.
If a theory is disproven, that theory might still be applicable in some ways, but it’s no longer considered a true law of nature. For example, Newton’s Laws were disproven in cases where the velocity is greater than the speed of light, but they can still be applied to mechanics that use slower velocities. Other theories that were widely held to be true for years, even centuries, that have been disproven due to new observations include the idea that the earth is the center of our solar system or that the planets orbited the sun in perfect circular orbits rather than the now-proven elliptical orbits.
Of course, a hypothesis or proven theory isn’t always disproven by one single experiment. This is because experiments may have errors in them, so a hypothesis that looks like it failed once is tested several times by several independent tests. Things that can cause errors include faulty instruments, misreading measurements or other data, or the bias of the researcher. Most measurements are given with a degree of error. Scientists work to make that degree of error as small as possible while still estimating and calculating everything that could cause errors in a test.
Unfortunately, the scientific method isn’t always applied correctly. Mistakes do happen, and some of them are actually fairly common. Because all scientists are human with biases and prejudices, it can be hard to be truly objective in some cases. It’s important that all results are as untainted by bias as possible, but that doesn’t always happen. Another common mistake is taking something as common sense or deciding that something is so logical that it doesn’t need to be tested. Scientists have to remember that everything has to be tested before it can be considered a solid hypothesis.
Scientists also have to be willing to look at every piece of data, even those which invalidate the hypothesis. Some scientists so strongly believe their hypothesis that they try to explain away data that disproves it. They want to find some reason as to why that data or experiment must be wrong instead of looking at their hypothesis again. All data has to be considered in the same way, even if it goes against the hypothesis.
Another common issue is forgetting to estimate all possible errors that could arise during testing. Some data that contradicts the hypothesis has been explained as falling into the range of error, but really, it was a systematic error that the researchers simply didn’t account for.
While some people do incorrectly use words like “theory” and “hypotheses” interchangeably, the scientific community has very strict definitions of these terms.
Hypothesis: A hypothesis is an observation, usually based on a cause and effect. It is the basic idea that has not been tested. A hypothesis is just an idea that explains something. It must go through a number of experiments designed to prove or disprove it.
Model: A hypothesis becomes a model after some testing has been done and it appears to be a valid observation. Some models are only valid in specific instances, such as when a value falls within a certain range. A model may also be called a law.
Scientific theory: A model that has been repeatedly tested and confirmed may become a scientific theory. These theories have been tested by a number of independent researchers around the world using various experiments, and all have supported the theory. Theories may be disproven, of course, but only after rigorous testing of a new hypothesis that seems to contradict them.
The scientific method has been used for years to create hypotheses, test them, and develop them into full scientific theories. While it appears to be a very simple method at first glance, it’s actually one of the most complex ways of testing and evaluating an observation or idea. It’s different from other types of explanation because it attempts to remove all bias and move forward using systematic experimentation only. However, like any method, there is room for error, such as bias or mechanical error. Of course, just like the theories it tests, the scientific method may someday be revised.
BSC Designer is strategy execution software that enhances strategy formulation and execution through KPIs, strategy maps, and dashboards. Our proprietary strategy implementation system guides companies in practical application of strategic planning.
The scientific process, learning objectives.
Figure 1 . Some of our ancestors, across the world and over the centuries, believed that trephination—the practice of making a hole in the skull, as shown here—allowed evil spirits to leave the body, thus curing mental illness and other disorders. (credit: “taiproject”/Flickr)
The goal of all scientists is to better understand the world around them. Psychologists focus their attention on understanding behavior, as well as the cognitive (mental) and physiological (body) processes that underlie behavior. In contrast to other methods that people use to understand the behavior of others, such as intuition and personal experience, the hallmark of scientific research is that there is evidence to support a claim. Scientific knowledge is empirical : It is grounded in objective, tangible evidence that can be observed time and time again, regardless of who is observing.
While behavior is observable, the mind is not. If someone is crying, we can see the behavior. However, the reason for the behavior is more difficult to determine. Is the person crying due to being sad, in pain, or happy? Sometimes we can learn the reason for someone’s behavior by simply asking a question, like “Why are you crying?” However, there are situations in which an individual is either uncomfortable or unwilling to answer the question honestly, or is incapable of answering. For example, infants would not be able to explain why they are crying. In such circumstances, the psychologist must be creative in finding ways to better understand behavior. This module explores how scientific knowledge is generated, and how important that knowledge is in forming decisions in our personal lives and in the public domain.
Figure 2 . The scientific method is a process for gathering data and processing information. It provides well-defined steps to standardize how scientific knowledge is gathered through a logical, rational problem-solving method.
Scientific knowledge is advanced through a process known as the scientific method. Basically, ideas (in the form of theories and hypotheses) are tested against the real world (in the form of empirical observations), and those empirical observations lead to more ideas that are tested against the real world, and so on.
The basic steps in the scientific method are:
In order to ask an important question that may improve our understanding of the world, a researcher must first observe natural phenomena. By making observations, a researcher can define a useful question. After finding a question to answer, the researcher can then make a prediction (a hypothesis) about what they think the answer will be. This prediction is usually a statement about the relationship between two or more variables. After making a hypothesis, the researcher will then design an experiment to test their hypothesis and evaluate the data gathered. These data will either support or refute the hypothesis. Based on the conclusions drawn from the data, the researcher will then find more evidence to support the hypothesis, look for counter-evidence to further strengthen the hypothesis, revise the hypothesis and create a new experiment, or continue to incorporate the information gathered to answer the research question.
Two key concepts in the scientific approach are theory and hypothesis. A theory is a well-developed set of ideas that propose an explanation for observed phenomena that can be used to make predictions about future observations. A hypothesis is a testable prediction that is arrived at logically from a theory. It is often worded as an if-then statement (e.g., if I study all night, I will get a passing grade on the test). The hypothesis is extremely important because it bridges the gap between the realm of ideas and the real world. As specific hypotheses are tested, theories are modified and refined to reflect and incorporate the result of these tests.
Figure 3 . The scientific method involves deriving hypotheses from theories and then testing those hypotheses. If the results are consistent with the theory, then the theory is supported. If the results are not consistent, then the theory should be modified and new hypotheses will be generated.
Other key components in following the scientific method include verifiability, predictability, falsifiability, and fairness. Verifiability means that an experiment must be replicable by another researcher. To achieve verifiability, researchers must make sure to document their methods and clearly explain how their experiment is structured and why it produces certain results.
Predictability in a scientific theory implies that the theory should enable us to make predictions about future events. The precision of these predictions is a measure of the strength of the theory.
Falsifiability refers to whether a hypothesis can be disproved. For a hypothesis to be falsifiable, it must be logically possible to make an observation or do a physical experiment that would show that there is no support for the hypothesis. Even when a hypothesis cannot be shown to be false, that does not necessarily mean it is not valid. Future testing may disprove the hypothesis. This does not mean that a hypothesis has to be shown to be false, just that it can be tested.
To determine whether a hypothesis is supported or not supported, psychological researchers must conduct hypothesis testing using statistics. Hypothesis testing is a type of statistics that determines the probability of a hypothesis being true or false. If hypothesis testing reveals that results were “statistically significant,” this means that there was support for the hypothesis and that the researchers can be reasonably confident that their result was not due to random chance. If the results are not statistically significant, this means that the researchers’ hypothesis was not supported.
Fairness implies that all data must be considered when evaluating a hypothesis. A researcher cannot pick and choose what data to keep and what to discard or focus specifically on data that support or do not support a particular hypothesis. All data must be accounted for, even if they invalidate the hypothesis.
To see how this process works, let’s consider a specific theory and a hypothesis that might be generated from that theory. As you’ll learn in a later module, the James-Lange theory of emotion asserts that emotional experience relies on the physiological arousal associated with the emotional state. If you walked out of your home and discovered a very aggressive snake waiting on your doorstep, your heart would begin to race and your stomach churn. According to the James-Lange theory, these physiological changes would result in your feeling of fear. A hypothesis that could be derived from this theory might be that a person who is unaware of the physiological arousal that the sight of the snake elicits will not feel fear.
Remember that a good scientific hypothesis is falsifiable, or capable of being shown to be incorrect. Recall from the introductory module that Sigmund Freud had lots of interesting ideas to explain various human behaviors. However, a major criticism of Freud’s theories is that many of his ideas are not falsifiable; for example, it is impossible to imagine empirical observations that would disprove the existence of the id, the ego, and the superego—the three elements of personality described in Freud’s theories. Despite this, Freud’s theories are widely taught in introductory psychology texts because of their historical significance for personality psychology and psychotherapy, and these remain the root of all modern forms of therapy.
Figure 4 . Many of the specifics of (a) Freud’s theories, such as (b) his division of the mind into id, ego, and superego, have fallen out of favor in recent decades because they are not falsifiable. In broader strokes, his views set the stage for much of psychological thinking today, such as the unconscious nature of the majority of psychological processes.
In contrast, the James-Lange theory does generate falsifiable hypotheses, such as the one described above. Some individuals who suffer significant injuries to their spinal columns are unable to feel the bodily changes that often accompany emotional experiences. Therefore, we could test the hypothesis by determining how emotional experiences differ between individuals who have the ability to detect these changes in their physiological arousal and those who do not. In fact, this research has been conducted and while the emotional experiences of people deprived of an awareness of their physiological arousal may be less intense, they still experience emotion (Chwalisz, Diener, & Gallagher, 1988).
Want to participate in a study? Visit this Psychological Research on the Net website and click on a link that sounds interesting to you in order to participate in online research.
The use of the scientific method is one of the main features that separates modern psychology from earlier philosophical inquiries about the mind. Compared to chemistry, physics, and other “natural sciences,” psychology has long been considered one of the “social sciences” because of the subjective nature of the things it seeks to study. Many of the concepts that psychologists are interested in—such as aspects of the human mind, behavior, and emotions—are subjective and cannot be directly measured. Psychologists often rely instead on behavioral observations and self-reported data, which are considered by some to be illegitimate or lacking in methodological rigor. Applying the scientific method to psychology, therefore, helps to standardize the approach to understanding its very different types of information.
The scientific method allows psychological data to be replicated and confirmed in many instances, under different circumstances, and by a variety of researchers. Through replication of experiments, new generations of psychologists can reduce errors and broaden the applicability of theories. It also allows theories to be tested and validated instead of simply being conjectures that could never be verified or falsified. All of this allows psychologists to gain a stronger understanding of how the human mind works.
Scientific articles published in journals and psychology papers written in the style of the American Psychological Association (i.e., in “APA style”) are structured around the scientific method. These papers include an introduction, which introduces the background information and outlines the hypotheses; a methods section, which outlines the specifics of how the experiment was conducted to test the hypothesis; a results section, which includes the statistics that tested the hypothesis and state whether it was supported or not supported, and a discussion and conclusion, which state the implications of finding support for, or no support for, the hypothesis. Writing articles and papers that adhere to the scientific method makes it easy for future researchers to repeat the study and attempt to replicate the results.
Psychological research has a long history involving important figures from diverse backgrounds. While the introductory module discussed several researchers who made significant contributions to the discipline, there are many more individuals who deserve attention in considering how psychology has advanced as a science through their work. For instance, Margaret Floy Washburn (1871–1939) was the first woman to earn a PhD in psychology. Her research focused on animal behavior and cognition (Margaret Floy Washburn, PhD, n.d.). Mary Whiton Calkins (1863–1930) was a preeminent first-generation American psychologist who opposed the behaviorist movement, conducted significant research into memory, and established one of the earliest experimental psychology labs in the United States (Mary Whiton Calkins, n.d.).
Figure 5 . (a) Margaret Floy Washburn was the first woman to earn a doctorate degree in psychology. (b) Psychologist Inez Beverly Prosser, who was the first African American woman to earn a PhD in psychology.
Francis Sumner (1895–1954) was the first African American to receive a PhD in psychology in 1920. His dissertation focused on issues related to psychoanalysis. Sumner also had research interests in racial bias and educational justice. Sumner was one of the founders of Howard University’s department of psychology, and because of his accomplishments, he is sometimes referred to as the “Father of Black Psychology.” Thirteen years later, Inez Beverly Prosser (1895–1934) became the first African American woman to receive a PhD in psychology. Prosser’s research highlighted issues related to education in segregated versus integrated schools, and ultimately, her work was very influential in the hallmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling that segregation of public schools was unconstitutional (Ethnicity and Health in America Series: Featured Psychologists, n.d.).
Although the establishment of psychology’s scientific roots occurred first in Europe and the United States, it did not take much time until researchers from around the world began to establish their own laboratories and research programs. For example, some of the first experimental psychology laboratories in South America were founded by Horatio Piñero (1869–1919) at two institutions in Buenos Aires, Argentina (Godoy & Brussino, 2010). In India, Gunamudian David Boaz (1908–1965) and Narendra Nath Sen Gupta (1889–1944) established the first independent departments of psychology at the University of Madras and the University of Calcutta, respectively. These developments provided an opportunity for Indian researchers to make important contributions to the field (Gunamudian David Boaz, n.d.; Narendra Nath Sen Gupta, n.d.).
When the American Psychological Association (APA) was first founded in 1892, all of the members were white males. However, by 1905, Mary Whiton Calkins was elected as the first female president of the APA, and by 1946, nearly one-quarter of American psychologists were female. Psychology became a popular degree option for students enrolled in the nation’s historically black higher education institutions, increasing the number of black Americans who went on to become psychologists. Given demographic shifts occurring in the United States and increased access to higher educational opportunities among historically underrepresented populations, there is reason to hope that the diversity of the field will increasingly match the larger population, and that the research contributions made by the psychologists of the future will better serve people of all backgrounds (Women and Minorities in Psychology, n.d.).
Experts agree that in order for an experiment to be counted as 'good science' or a 'good experiment', they must contain three things:
~Information obtained from: http://www.chacha.com/question/what-are-least-three-things-you-should-be-careful-to-do-when-designing-an-experiment
I do not claim ownership of the above website nor its trademarks and I do not claim ownership for the information.
All experiments are based on hypothesis that has to be tested for truth. All scientific experiments therefore follow a logical methodology to arrive at a conclusion that must have a universal result that becomes universal accepted truth in Scientific experiments. It is necessary to follow the universal methodology by collection of the data for analysis to determine the elements or functional relationship in the experimental process. It is similar to any mathematical function that proceeds from one step to the next with the application of a universal formula that is written when solved.
yes all experiments need to have a control
All properly-designed experiments should have some sort of control.
A constant.
It is necessary for a hypothesis to have two things, the words IF and THEN. Another word can be added, BECAUSE. A successful hypothesis has to have all three.
Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.
Nature volume 631 , pages 755–759 ( 2024 ) Cite this article
196k Accesses
1 Citations
2042 Altmetric
Metrics details
Stable diffusion revolutionized image creation from descriptive text. GPT-2 (ref. 1 ), GPT-3(.5) (ref. 2 ) and GPT-4 (ref. 3 ) demonstrated high performance across a variety of language tasks. ChatGPT introduced such language models to the public. It is now clear that generative artificial intelligence (AI) such as large language models (LLMs) is here to stay and will substantially change the ecosystem of online text and images. Here we consider what may happen to GPT-{ n } once LLMs contribute much of the text found online. We find that indiscriminate use of model-generated content in training causes irreversible defects in the resulting models, in which tails of the original content distribution disappear. We refer to this effect as ‘model collapse’ and show that it can occur in LLMs as well as in variational autoencoders (VAEs) and Gaussian mixture models (GMMs). We build theoretical intuition behind the phenomenon and portray its ubiquity among all learned generative models. We demonstrate that it must be taken seriously if we are to sustain the benefits of training from large-scale data scraped from the web. Indeed, the value of data collected about genuine human interactions with systems will be increasingly valuable in the presence of LLM-generated content in data crawled from the Internet.
The development of LLMs is very involved and requires large quantities of training data. Yet, although current LLMs 2 , 4 , 5 , 6 , including GPT-3, were trained on predominantly human-generated text, this may change. If the training data of most future models are also scraped from the web, then they will inevitably train on data produced by their predecessors. In this paper, we investigate what happens when text produced by, for example, a version of GPT forms most of the training dataset of following models. What happens to GPT generations GPT-{ n } as n increases? We discover that indiscriminately learning from data produced by other models causes ‘model collapse’—a degenerative process whereby, over time, models forget the true underlying data distribution, even in the absence of a shift in the distribution over time. We give examples of model collapse for GMMs, VAEs and LLMs. We show that, over time, models start losing information about the true distribution, which first starts with tails disappearing, and learned behaviours converge over the generations to a point estimate with very small variance. Furthermore, we show that this process is inevitable, even for cases with almost ideal conditions for long-term learning, that is, no function estimation error. We also briefly mention two close concepts to model collapse from the existing literature: catastrophic forgetting arising in the framework of task-free continual learning 7 and data poisoning 8 , 9 maliciously leading to unintended behaviour. Neither is able to explain the phenomenon of model collapse fully, as the setting is fundamentally different, but they provide another perspective on the observed phenomenon and are discussed in more depth in the Supplementary Materials . Finally, we discuss the broader implications of model collapse. We note that access to the original data distribution is crucial: in learning tasks in which the tails of the underlying distribution matter, one needs access to real human-produced data. In other words, the use of LLMs at scale to publish content on the Internet will pollute the collection of data to train their successors: data about human interactions with LLMs will be increasingly valuable.
Definition 2.1 (model collapse).
Model collapse is a degenerative process affecting generations of learned generative models, in which the data they generate end up polluting the training set of the next generation. Being trained on polluted data, they then mis-perceive reality. The process is depicted in Fig. 1a . We separate two special cases: early model collapse and late model collapse. In early model collapse, the model begins losing information about the tails of the distribution; in late model collapse, the model converges to a distribution that carries little resemblance to the original one, often with substantially reduced variance.
This process occurs owing to three specific sources of error compounding over generations and causing deviation from the original model:
Statistical approximation error. This is the primary type of error, which arises owing to the number of samples being finite, and disappears as the number of samples tends to infinity. This occurs because of a non-zero probability that information can get lost at every step of resampling.
Functional expressivity error. This is a secondary type of error, arising owing to limited function approximator expressiveness. In particular, neural networks are only universal approximators as their size goes to infinity. As a result, a neural network can introduce non-zero likelihood outside the support of the original distribution or zero likelihood inside the support of the original distribution. A simple example of the expressivity error is if we tried fitting a mixture of two Gaussians with a single Gaussian. Even if we have perfect information about the data distribution (that is, infinite number of samples), model errors will be inevitable. However, in the absence of the other two types of error, this can only occur at the first generation.
Functional approximation error. This is a secondary type of error, arising primarily from the limitations of learning procedures, for example, structural bias of stochastic gradient descent 10 , 11 or choice of objective 12 . This error can be viewed as one arising in the limit of infinite data and perfect expressivity at each generation.
Each of the above can cause model collapse to get worse or better. More approximation power can even be a double-edged sword—better expressiveness may counteract statistical noise, resulting in a good approximation of the true distribution, but it can equally compound the noise. More often than not, we get a cascading effect, in which individual inaccuracies combine to cause the overall error to grow. For example, overfitting the density model causes the model to extrapolate incorrectly and assigns high-density regions to low-density regions not covered in the training set support; these will then be sampled with arbitrary frequency. It is worth noting that other types of error exist. For example, computers have limited precision in practice. We now turn to mathematical intuition to explain how the above give rise to the errors observed, how different sources can compound and how we can quantify the average model divergence.
Here we provide a theoretical intuition for the phenomenon of model collapse. We argue that the process of model collapse is universal among generative models that recursively train on data generated by previous generations. We quantify the sources of errors discussed in the previous section by examining two mathematical models, which prove to be simple enough to provide analytical expressions for quantities of interest, but also portray the phenomenon of model collapse: a discrete distribution in the absence of functional expressivity and approximation errors, and a multidimensional Gaussian approximation, portraying joint functional expressivity and statistical errors. We further illustrate the impact of all three jointly for a more complex setting of density estimation in Hilbert spaces in the Supplementary Materials .
The overall stochastic process we consider, which we call learning with generational data, is the following. The dataset at generation i is \({{\mathcal{D}}}_{i}\) , comprising independent and identically distributed random variables \({X}_{j}^{i}\) with distribution p i , j ∈ {1,…, M i } denotes the size of the dataset. Going from generation i to generation i + 1, we aim to estimate the distribution of samples in \({{\mathcal{D}}}_{i}\) , with an approximation \({p}_{{\theta }_{i+1}}\) . This step is what we refer to as functional approximation, \({p}_{{\theta }_{i+1}}={{\mathcal{F}}}_{\theta }({p}_{i})\) . The dataset \({{\mathcal{D}}}_{i+1}\) is then generated by sampling from \({p}_{i+1}={\alpha }_{i}{p}_{{\theta }_{i+1}}+{\beta }_{i}{p}_{i}+{\gamma }_{i}{p}_{0}\) , with non-negative parameters α i , β i , γ i summing to 1, that is, they represent proportions of data used from different generations. This corresponds to a mixing of data coming from the original distribution ( γ i ), data used by the previous generation ( β i ) and data generated by the new model ( α i ). We refer to this as the sampling step. For the mathematical models to come, we consider α i = γ i = 0, that is, data only from a single step are used, whereas numerical experiments are performed on more realistic choices of parameters.
In this subsection, we consider a discrete probability distribution in absence of functional approximation and expressivity errors, that is, \({\mathcal{F}}(p)=p\) . In this case, model collapse arises only because of statistical errors from the sampling step. At first, the tails (low-probability events) begin to disappear as a result of the low probability of sampling them and, over time, support of the distribution shrinks. Denoting the sample size as M , if we consider state i with probability \(q\le \frac{1}{M}\) , the expected number of samples with value i coming from those events will be less than 1. In practice, this would mean that we lose information about them. Considering more generally some state i with probability q , using standard conditional probability, we can show that the probability of losing information (that is, sampling no data at some generation) is equal to 1 − q , implying that the distribution must converge to a delta function positioned at some state, with the probability of ending up at a certain state equal to the probability of sampling said state from the original distribution.
This can be shown directly by considering the process \({{\bf{X}}}^{i}\to {\mathcal{F}}\,\to \) \({p}_{i+1}\to {{\bf{X}}}^{i+1}\) as a Markov chain, as X i +1 only depends on X i . Furthermore, if all the \({X}_{j}^{i}\) have the same value, then at the next generation, the approximated distribution will be exactly a delta function and therefore all of \({X}_{j}^{i+1}\) will also have the same value. This implies that the Markov chain contains at least one absorbing state and therefore, with probability 1, it will converge to one of the absorbing states. This is a well-known fact, of which a proof is provided in the Supplementary Materials . For this chain, the only absorbing states are those corresponding to delta functions. As a result, as we follow the progress of model collapse, we are guaranteed to end up in a constant state, having lost all the information of the original distribution when the chain is absorbed. This argument also works in general owing to floating-point representations being discrete, making the Markov chain over the parameters of the model discrete. Thus, as long as the model parameterization allows for delta functions, we will get to it, because—owing to sampling errors—the only possible absorbing states are delta functions. On the basis of the discussion above, we see how both early model collapse, in which only the low-probability events get cut off, and late stage model collapse, in which the process begins to collapse into a single mode, must arise in the case of discrete distributions with perfect functional approximation.
Following the discussion about discrete distributions, we now present a more generic result, which can be shown in the Gaussian approximation setting, in which each generation is approximated using the unbiased estimates of the mean and the variance. A similar result holds more generally, which we detail in the Supplementary Materials .
Assume the original data are sampled from distribution \({{\mathcal{D}}}_{0}\) (not necessarily Gaussian), with non-zero sample variance. Assume X n are fit recursively using the unbiased sample mean and variance estimators from the previous generation, \({X}_{j}^{n}| {\mu }_{n},{\Sigma }_{n} \sim {\mathcal{N}}({\mu }_{n},{\Sigma }_{n})\) , with a fixed sample size. Then,
in which \({{\mathbb{W}}}_{2}\) denotes the Wasserstein-2 distance between the true distribution and its approximation at generation n .
In words, this implies that not only does the n th generation approximation diverge arbitrarily far from the original one but it also collapses to be zero variance as the number of generations increases, with probability 1. The results are very analogous to that seen in the discrete case, with this theorem illustrating the effect of late stage model collapse, in which the process begins to collapse to be zero variance. The early stage model collapse can also be seen and the interested reader is referred to the Supplementary Materials for a more in-depth discussion.
In this section, we evaluate the effect of model collapse on language models. We cover more interpretable machine learning models—VAEs and GMMs—in the Supplementary Materials . Code is publically available in ref. 13 .
Model collapse is universal across various families of machine learning models. Yet, if small models such as GMMs and VAEs are normally trained from scratch, LLMs are different. They are so expensive to retrain from scratch that they are typically initialized with pre-trained models such as BERT 4 , RoBERTa 5 or GPT-2 (ref. 2 ), which are trained on large text corpora. They are then fine-tuned to various downstream tasks 14 .
Here we explore what happens with language models when they are sequentially fine-tuned with data generated by other models. We can easily replicate all experiments covered in this paper with larger language models in non-fine-tuning settings to demonstrate model collapse. Given that training a single moderately large model produces twice the American lifetime’s worth of CO 2 (ref. 15 ), we opted to not run such an experiment and instead focus on a more realistic setting for a proof of concept. Note that even the language experiments described in this paper took weeks to run. We evaluate the most common setting of training a language model—a fine-tuning setting for which each of the training cycles starts from a pre-trained model with recent data. The data here come from another fine-tuned pre-trained model. Because training is restricted to produce models that are close to the original pre-trained model, and data points generated by the models will generally produce very small gradients, the expectation here may be that the model should only change moderately after fine-tuning. We fine-tune the OPT-125m causal language model made available by Meta through Hugging Face 6 .
We fine-tune it on the wikitext2 dataset 16 . For data generation from the trained models, we use a five-way beam search. We block training sequences to be 64 tokens long; then, for each token sequence in the training set, we ask the model to predict the next 64 tokens. We go through all of the original training dataset and produce an artificial dataset of the same size. Because we go through all of the original dataset and predict all of the blocks, if the model had 0 error, it would produce the original wikitext2 dataset. Training for each generation starts with generation from the original training data. Each experiment is run five times and the results are shown as five separate runs with different randomness seeds. The original model fine-tuned with real wikitext2 data obtains 34 mean perplexity, from the zero-shot baseline of 115, that is, it successfully learns the task. Finally, to be as realistic as possible, we use the best-performing model on the original task, evaluated using the original wikitext2 validation set, as the base model for the subsequent generations, meaning that—in practice—observed model collapse can be even more pronounced. Here we consider two different settings:
Five epochs, no original training data. Here the model is trained for five epochs starting on the original dataset but with no original data retained for subsequent runs. The overall original task performance is presented in Fig. 1b . We find that training with generated data allows us to adapt to the underlying task, losing some performance, from 20 to 28 perplexity points.
Ten epochs, 10% of original training data preserved. Here the model is trained for ten epochs on the original dataset and with every new generation of training, a random 10% of the original data points is sampled. The overall original task performance is presented in Fig. 1c . We find that preservation of the original data allows for better model fine-tuning and leads to only minor degradation of performance.
Both training regimes lead to degraded performance in our models, yet we do find that learning with generated data is possible and models can successfully learn (some of) the underlying task. In particular, from Fig. 1 and their 3D versions in the Supplementary Materials , we see that model collapse occurs, as the density of samples with low perplexity begins to accumulate over the generations. This in turn makes it likely that, over the generations, the sampled data will similarly collapse to a delta function.
a , Model collapse refers to a degenerative learning process in which models start forgetting improbable events over time, as the model becomes poisoned with its own projection of reality. Here data are assumed to be human-curated and start off clean; then model 0 is trained and data are sampled from it; at step n , data are added to the overall data from step n − 1 and this combination is used to train model n . Data obtained with Monte Carlo sampling should ideally be statistically close to the original, provided that fitting and sampling procedures are perfect. This process depicts what happens in real life with the Internet: model-generated data become pervasive. b , c , Performance of OPT-125m models of different generations evaluated using the original wikitext2 test dataset. Shown on the left are the histograms of perplexities of each individual data training sequence produced by different generations as evaluated by the very first model trained with the real data. Over the generations, models tend to produce samples that the original model trained with real data is more likely to produce. At the same time, a much longer tail appears for later generations. Later generations start producing samples that would never be produced by the original model, that is, they start misperceiving reality based on errors introduced by their ancestors. The same plots are shown in 3D in the Supplementary Materials . On the right, average perplexity and its standard deviation are shown for each independent run. The x axis refers to the generation of the model. ‘Real’ refers to the ‘model 0’ trained on the original wikitext2 dataset; model 1 was trained on the data produced by model 0, model 2 was trained on data produced by model 1 and so on, with all generated datasets equal in size. We find that models trained on generated data are able to learn some of the original task, but with errors, as seen from the increase in perplexity.
It is important to note here that the observed behaviour is in line with the general intuition established in the section ‘Theoretical intuition’. To be precise, in all experiments, generational learning is only performed on a finite (usually small) number of generations, whereas claims of the section ‘Theoretical intuition’ are mostly presented in the limit of generations going to infinity. However, as seen from experiments on VAEs and GMMs in the Supplementary Materials , convergence to delta functions and specific rates of such convergence are highly related to the specifics of the problem considered, and complete collapse may or may not occur, even after a small number of steps. This is further illustrated theoretically in the Supplementary Materials , in which potentially notable divergence from the original model can occur even after a few generations.
Figure 1b,c on the left shows histograms of individual data-point perplexities generated by the models of different generations as is evaluated by the first model developed with real wikitext2 training data. Here, over the generations, models tend to produce more sequences that the original model would produce with the higher likelihood. The observed effect is similar to that described for VAEs and GMMs in the Supplementary Materials , in which—over the generations—models started to produce samples that would be produced with higher probabilities by the original model. At the same time, we discover that generated data have much longer tails, suggesting that some of the data would never be produced by the original model—these are the errors that accumulate because of the learning with generational data.
Example of text outputs of an OPT-125m model affected by model collapse—models degrade over generations, for which each new generation is trained on data produced by the previous generation.
Input: some started before 1360 — was typically accomplished by a master mason and a small team of itinerant masons, supplemented by local parish labourers, according to Poyntz Wright. But other authors reject this model, suggesting instead that leading architects designed the parish church towers based on early examples of Perpendicular.
Gen 0: Revival architecture such as St. John’s Cathedral in London. The earliest surviving example of Perpendicular Revival architecture is found in the 18th @-@ century Church of Our Lady of Guernsey, which dates from the late 19th century. There are two types of perpendicular churches : those.
Gen 1: architecture such as St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome or St. Peter’s Basilica in Buenos Aires. There is no evidence that any of these buildings were built during the reign of Pope Innocent III, but it is possible that they may have been built during the reign of his successor, Pope Innocent.
Gen 5: ism, which had been translated into more than 100 languages including English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Polish, Hungarian, Slovak, Lithuanian, Estonian, Finnish, Romanian, Bulgarian, Turkish, Croatian, Serbian, Ukrainian, Russian, Kazakh, Kyrgyz.
Gen 9: architecture. In addition to being home to some of the world’s largest populations of black @-@ tailed jackrabbits, white @-@ tailed jackrabbits, blue @-@ tailed jackrabbits, red @-@ tailed jackrabbits, yellow @-.
We find that data generated by language models in our experiments end up containing a large number of repeating phrases, as in Example 1. The repeating problem has been observed in nearly all text-generation models 17 , 18 and, to rule this out as the cause of model collapse, we further provide numerical experiments when models are explicitly encouraged to produce non-repeating sequences with a repeating penalty of 2.0. We find that this causes the models to produce lower score continuations to avoid using repeats, which—as a result—causes the consequent models to perform even worse. Model perplexities shift across the generations towards more probable token sequences, as measured using the model trained on the original real data distribution. Further illustrations are provided in the Supplementary Materials . In particular, enforcing this for the LLM experiments causes the perplexity to double compared with the original. Models remain as susceptible to model collapse, if not more.
The described process demonstrates that fine-tuning of language models does not curb the effects of model collapse and models that are being fine-tuned are also vulnerable. We find that, over the generations, models tend to produce more probable sequences from the original data and start introducing their own improbable sequences, that is, errors.
We now discuss the implications of model collapse on the underlying learning dynamics of LLMs. Long-term poisoning attacks on language models are not new. For example, we saw the creation of click, content and troll farms, a form of human ‘language models’, whose job is to misguide social networks and search algorithms. The negative effect that these poisoning attacks had on search results led to changes in search algorithms. For example, Google downgraded farmed articles 19 , putting more emphasis on content produced by trustworthy sources, such as education domains, whereas DuckDuckGo removed them altogether 20 . What is different with the arrival of LLMs is the scale at which such poisoning can happen once it is automated. Preserving the ability of LLMs to model low-probability events is essential to the fairness of their predictions: such events are often relevant to marginalized groups. Low-probability events are also vital to understand complex systems 21 .
Our evaluation suggests a ‘first mover advantage’ when it comes to training models such as LLMs. In our work, we demonstrate that training on samples from another generative model can induce a distribution shift, which—over time—causes model collapse. This in turn causes the model to mis-perceive the underlying learning task. To sustain learning over a long period of time, we need to make sure that access to the original data source is preserved and that further data not generated by LLMs remain available over time. The need to distinguish data generated by LLMs from other data raises questions about the provenance of content that is crawled from the Internet: it is unclear how content generated by LLMs can be tracked at scale. One option is community-wide coordination to ensure that different parties involved in LLM creation and deployment share the information needed to resolve questions of provenance. Otherwise, it may become increasingly difficult to train newer versions of LLMs without access to data that were crawled from the Internet before the mass adoption of the technology or direct access to data generated by humans at scale.
Data generation code for GMM experiments is available in ref. 13 . Data used for VAE experiments are available in ref. 22 . Data used for LLM experiments are available in ref. 16 .
Code for all experiments is publically available in ref. 13 .
Radford, A. et al. Language models are unsupervised multitask learners. OpenAI blog 1 , 9 (2019).
Google Scholar
Brown, T. et al. Language models are few-shot learners. Adv. Neural Inf. Process. Syst. 33 , 1877–1901 (2020).
OpenAI. GPT-4 Technical Report. https://cdn.openai.com/papers/gpt-4.pdf (2023).
Devlin, J., Chang, M.-W., Lee, K. & Toutanova, K. in Proc. 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers) (eds Burstein, J., Doran, C. & Solorio, T.) 4171–4186 (Association for Computational Linguistics, 2019).
Liu, Y. et al. RoBERTa: a Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach. Preprint at https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.11692 (2019).
Zhang, S. et al. Opt: open pre-trained transformer language models. Preprint at https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.01068 (2022).
Aljundi, R., Kelchtermans, K. & Tuytelaars, T. Task-free continual learning. in: Proc. 2019 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 11254–11263 (IEEE, 2019).
Carlini, N. & Terzis, A. in Proc. Tenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR, 2022).
Carlini, N. et al. in Proc. 2024 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP) 179 (IEEE, 2024).
Mousavi-Hosseini, A., Park, S., Girotti, M., Mitliagkas, I. & Erdogdu, M. A. in Proc. Eleventh International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR, 2023).
Soudry, D., Hoffer, E., Nacson, M. S., Gunasekar, S. & Srebro, N. The implicit bias of gradient descent on separable data. J. Mach. Learn. Res. 19 , 1–57 (2018).
MathSciNet Google Scholar
Gu, Y., Dong, L., Wei, F. & Huang, M. in Proc. Twelfth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR, 2024).
Shumailov, I. & Shumaylov, Z. Public code for Model Collapse (0.1). Zenodo https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10866595 (2024).
Bommasani, R. et al. On the opportunities and risks of foundation models. Preprint at https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.07258 (2022).
Strubell, E., Ganesh, A. & McCallum, A. in Proc. 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (eds Korhonen, A., Traum, D. & Màrquez, L.) 3645–3650 (Association for Computational Linguistics, 2019).
Merity, S., Xiong, C., Bradbury, J. & Socher, R. in Proc. 5th International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR, 2017).
Keskar, N. S., McCann, B., Varshney, L. R., Xiong, C. & Socher, R. CTRL: a conditional transformer language model for controllable generation. Preprint at https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.05858 (2019).
Shumailov, I. et al. in Proc. 2021 IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy (EuroS&P) 212–231 (IEEE, 2021).
Google. Finding more high-quality sites in search. Google https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/finding-more-high-quality-sites-in.html (2011).
Mims, C. The search engine backlash against ‘content mills’. MIT Technology Review https://www.technologyreview.com/2010/07/26/26327/the-search-engine-backlash-against-content-mills/ (2010).
Taleb, N. N. Black swans and the domains of statistics. Am. Stat. 61 , 198–200 (2007).
Article MathSciNet Google Scholar
LeCun, Y., Cortes, C. & Burges, C. J. C. The MNIST database of handwritten digits. http://yann.lecun.com/exdb/mnist/ (1998).
Download references
This paper is dedicated to the memory of Professor Ross J. Anderson, our colleague and friend, who contributed much to this and other works we have produced over the years. We thank A. Thudi, D. Glukhov, P. Zaika, and D. Barak for useful discussions and feedback.
These authors contributed equally: Ilia Shumailov, Zakhar Shumaylov
Deceased: Ross Anderson
OATML, Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
Ilia Shumailov & Yarin Gal
Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
Zakhar Shumaylov
Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Imperial College London, London, UK
University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Nicolas Papernot
Vector Institute, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Department of Computer Science and Technology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
Ross Anderson
School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK
You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar
I.S. and Z.S. proposed and developed the idea, led the research and mathematical modelling and developed the GMM and VAE experiments. I.S. and Y.Z. developed the language-model experiments. N.P., Y.G. and R.A. supervised and guided the project. All authors contributed to writing of the manuscript. Y.G. is supported by a Turing AI Fellowship financed by the UK government’s Office for Artificial Intelligence, through UK Research and Innovation (grant reference EP/V030302/1) and delivered by the Alan Turing Institute.
Correspondence to Ilia Shumailov , Zakhar Shumaylov or Yarin Gal .
Competing interests.
The authors declare no competing interests.
Peer review information.
Nature thanks the anonymous reviewers for their contribution to the peer review of this work.
Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Supplementary information, supplementary data, rights and permissions.
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .
Reprints and permissions
Cite this article.
Shumailov, I., Shumaylov, Z., Zhao, Y. et al. AI models collapse when trained on recursively generated data. Nature 631 , 755–759 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07566-y
Download citation
Received : 20 October 2023
Accepted : 14 May 2024
Published : 24 July 2024
Issue Date : 25 July 2024
DOI : https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07566-y
Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:
Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.
Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative
Ai models fed ai-generated data quickly spew nonsense.
Nature (2024)
By submitting a comment you agree to abide by our Terms and Community Guidelines . If you find something abusive or that does not comply with our terms or guidelines please flag it as inappropriate.
Sign up for the Nature Briefing: AI and Robotics newsletter — what matters in AI and robotics research, free to your inbox weekly.
IMAGES
VIDEO
COMMENTS
A hypothesis isn't necessarily right. Instead, it's a "best guess," and the scientist must test it to see if it's actually correct. Scientists test hypotheses by making predictions: if hypothesis X is right, then Y should be true. Then, they do experiments or make observations to see if the predictions are correct.
The six steps of the scientific method include: 1) asking a question about something you observe, 2) doing background research to learn what is already known about the topic, 3) constructing a hypothesis, 4) experimenting to test the hypothesis, 5) analyzing the data from the experiment and drawing conclusions, and 6) communicating the results ...
A simple experiment should have only one independent variable. All other factors that could have an effect on the outcome of the experiment must be controlled or held constant. In addition, one group in the experiment should be a control group, a designated group used as a comparative reference point. This group will not have a manipulated ...
The scientific method is used in all sciences—including chemistry, physics, geology, and psychology. ... A hypothesis must be testable and falsifiable in order to be valid. For example, "Botticelli's Birth of Venus is beautiful" is not a good hypothesis, because there is no experiment that could test this statement and show it to be false ...
An experiment must have an independent variable (something that is manipulated by the person doing the experiment), and a dependent variable (the thing being measured which may be affected by the independent variable). All other variables must be controlled so that they do not affect the outcome. During an experiment, data is collected.
First, scientific experiments must have an experimental group. This is the group that receives the experimental treatment necessary to address the hypothesis. The experimental group receives the vaccine, but how can we know if the vaccine made a difference? Many things may change HPV infection rates in a group of people over time.
Forming a Hypothesis. The next step in a scientific investigation is forming a hypothesis.A hypothesis is a possible answer to a scientific question, but it isn't just any answer. A hypothesis must be based on scientific knowledge, and it must be logical. A hypothesis also must be falsifiable. In other words, it must be possible to make observations that would disprove the hypothesis if it ...
During an experiment, the scientist collects data that will help them learn about the phenomenon they are studying. Then the scientists analyze the results of the experiment (that is, the data), often using statistical, mathematical, and/or graphical methods. ... The hypothesis must apply to all the situations in the universe. 10. What is a ...
A variable is any part of the experiment that can vary or change during the experiment. A control is a part of the experiment that does not change. Look for the variables and controls in the example that follows. As a simple example, an experiment might be conducted to test the hypothesis that phosphate limits the growth of algae in freshwater ...
Testing hypotheses and theories is at the core of the process of science.Any aspect of the natural world could be explained in many different ways. It is the job of science to collect all those plausible explanations and to use scientific testing to filter through them, retaining ideas that are supported by the evidence and discarding the others. You can think of scientific testing as ...
Study with Quizlet and memorize flashcards containing terms like Each fall, a gardener collects the fruit from her rose bushes (called rose hips) to make tea, jelly, and syrup. She noticed that yellow rose plants always form more rose hips than the red-flowered plants of the same size and location. Since both plants have similar number of flowers in the spring, and both make rose hips, the ...
Good scientific experiments must be reproducible in both a conceptual and an operational sense. 5 If a scientist publishes the results of an experiment, there should be enough of the methodology published with the results that a similarly-equipped, independent, and skeptical scientist could reproduce the results of the experiment in their own lab.
The process has five steps: define variables, formulate a hypothesis, design an experiment, assign subjects, and measure the dependent variable. To start the experimental design process, one needs ...
This page titled 1.6: Scientific Experiments is shared under a CK-12 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Suzanne Wakim & Mandeep Grewal via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform. An experiment is a special type of scientific investigation that is performed under controlled conditions.
An experiment must always be done under controlled conditions. The goal of an experiment is to test a hypothesis. The data from the experiment will verify or falsify the hypothesis. Variables. In an experiment, it is important to change only one factor. All other factors must be kept the same.
This must happen if the experiments repeatedly and clearly show that their hypothesis is wrong. It doesn't matter how elegant or supported a theory is—if it can be disproven once, it can't be considered a law of nature. Experimentation is the supreme rule in the scientific method, and if an experiment shows that the hypothesis isn't ...
Natural experiments occur when the universe, in a sense, performs an experiment for us — that is, the relevant experimental set-up already exists, and all we have to do is observe the results. For example, researchers in England wanted to know if a program to improve the health and well-being of young children and their families was effective.
Other key components in following the scientific method include verifiability, predictability, falsifiability, and fairness. Verifiability means that an experiment must be replicable by another researcher. To achieve verifiability, researchers must make sure to document their methods and clearly explain how their experiment is structured and why it produces certain results.
The process of science works at multiple levels — from the small scale (e.g., a comparison of the genes of three closely related North American butterfly species) to the large scale (e.g., a half-century-long series of investigations of the idea that geographic isolation of a population can trigger speciation). The process of science works in much the same way whether embodied by an ...
Type 3 experiments are those experiments whose results may be consistent with the hypothesis, but are useless because regardless of the outcome, the findings are also consistent with other models. In other words, every result isn't informative. Formulate hypotheses in such a way that you can prove or disprove them by direct experiment.
In other words, the experiment must be designed so that it will produce results that either clearly support or clearly falsify (disprove) the hypothesis. It helps to use "If-Then" predictions based on your hypothesis. "Place 100 fruit flies at 18 degrees Celsius for one generation. Also place 100 fruit flies at 29 degrees Celsius for one ...
Reproducing experiments is one of the cornerstones of the scientific process. Here's why it's so important. Since 2005, when Stanford University professor John Ioannidis published his paper "Why ...
Best Answer. Experts agree that in order for an experiment to be counted as 'good science' or a 'good experiment', they must contain three things: A control. Data collected from the experiment ...
All the subjects in this study are female, so this variable is the same in all groups. In a well-designed study, the two groups will be of similar age. The presence or absence of the virus is what the researchers will measure at the end of the experiment. Ideally the two groups will both be HPV-free at the start of the experiment. [/hidden-answer]
The repeating problem has been observed in nearly all text-generation models 17,18 and, to rule this out as the cause of model collapse, we further provide numerical experiments when models are ...