Very instructive anecdote on motivated reasoning in research (in cost-effectiveness analyses, even!):
Back in the 90’s I did some consulting work for a startup that was developing a new medical device. They were honest people–they never pressured me. My contract stipulated that I did not have to submit my publications to them for prior review. But they paid me handsomely, wined and dined me, and gave me travel opportunities to nice places. About a decade after that relationship came to an end, amicably, I had occasion to review the article I had published about the work I did for them. It was a cost-effectiveness analysis. Cost-effectiveness analyses have highly ramified gardens of forking paths that biomedical and clinical researchers cannot even begin to imagine. I saw that at virtually every decision point in designing the study and in estimating parameters, I had shaded things in favor of the device. Not by a large amount in any case, but slightly at almost every opportunity. The result was that my “base case analysis” was, in reality, something more like a “best case” analysis. Peer review did not discover any of this during the publication process, because each individual estimate was reasonable. When I wrote the paper, I was not in the least bit aware that I was doing this; I truly thought I was being “objective.”
Very instructive anecdote on motivated reasoning in research (in cost-effectiveness analyses, even!):
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2021/08/15/national-academy-of-sciences-scandal-and-the-concept-of-countervailing-power/#comment-1984513