A running list of articles and research that challenge my beliefs, or demonstrate unintended consequences. I would like to note that all of the excerpts are just as prone to biases as the original beliefs, so please do not stop at the excerpt– read the whole article to see if it really challenges your beliefs, too!

Food deserts are a major cause of obesity:
“Who a person is may matter more than where they shop for food in predicting their consumption of unhealthy food, according to a new RAND Corporation study that challenges notions that building supermarkets in “food deserts” can help the nation eat better.” –
https://www.rand.org/news/press/2017/04/25.html

No differences in brain structures between genders:
“Considerable overlap between the distributions for males and females was common, and subregional differences were smaller after accounting for global differences. There was generally greater male variance across structural measures. The modestly higher male score on two cognitive tests was partly mediated via structural differences.” – http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/04/04/123729

U.S. has low life expectancy for the OECD despite highest healthcare spending:
“Just simply normalizing for violent and accidental death puts the U.S. right to the top of the life-expectancy rankings.” – http://www.nationalreview.com/article/446402/american-health-care-system-has-good-results-high-expenses

More education leads to economic growth:
“Contrary to a few recent papers that have identified significant nonlinearities between education and growth, our results suggest that mean years of schooling is not a statistically relevant variable in growth regressions.” – https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/69381/1/733814107.pdf

Political conservatives are more likely to think that genetics explain socioeconomic outcomes:
“Contrary to expectations, however, we find little evidence that it is more common for whites, the socioeconomically advantaged, or political conservatives to believe that genetics are important for health and social outcomes.” – http://www.asanet.org/research-and-publications/journals/social-psychology-quarterly/politics-gene-social-status-and-beliefs-about-genetics-individual-outcomes

The U.S. has a shortage of workers in the STEM fields:
“Our examination of the IT labor market, guestworker flows, and the STEM education pipeline finds consistent and clear trends suggesting that the United States has more than a sufficient supply of workers available to work in STEM occupations.” – http://www.epi.org/publication/bp359-guestworkers-high-skill-labor-market-analysis/

Compelling students to attend class leads to more learning:
“Our IV estimates imply in turn that a 10 percentage point increase in attendance
decreases grades by 0.1 of a standard deviation.” – http://conference.iza.org/conference_files/SUM_2017/oosterveen_m23625.pdf

Brexiters/Trumpists don’t trust political “experts”:
“The results show that Leave voters are less likely than Remain voters to trust every single type of expert listed.” – https://yougov.co.uk/news/2017/02/17/leave-voters-are-less-likely-trust-any-experts-eve/

Charter schools are educational backwaters for fundamentalist Christians:
“This research shows that charter schools in the urban areas of Massachusetts have large, positive effects on educational outcomes.” – https://www.brookings.edu/research/massachusetts-charter-cap-holds-back-disadvantaged-students/

Schools actually educate, not just act as barriers and signaling devices:
“We find that signaling explains most (if not all) of the returns to schooling.” – http://www.parthen-impact.com/parthen-uploads/78/2015/add_1_258968_6jxqYCJ7tK.pdf

Free markets don’t tamp down racism and discrimination by themselves: “Results suggest that employers who engage in hiring discrimination are less likely to remain in business six years later.” – https://www.sociologicalscience.com/articles-v3-36-849/

Growing up in poor neighborhoods leads to poor outcomes later in life:
“Neighborhoods and schools influence earnings only early in the working life and this influence falls rapidly and becomes negligible after age 30.” – http://ftp.iza.org/dp10089.pdf
“The results show that neighborhood correlations are in general very small and in particular they are much smaller than the sibling correlations.” – https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10888-010-9144-1

Sweatshops are good insofar as they at least provide the option of employment:
“Industrial jobs offered more hours than the control group’s informal opportunities, but had little impact on incomes due to lower wages… Applicants seem to understand the risks, but took the industrial work temporarily while searching for better work.” – https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2843595

Sexism explains why there are so few academic-level female mathematicians:
“Male–female ratios in mathematical reasoning are substantially lower than 30 years ago, but have been stable over the last 20 years and still favor males.” – http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.167.7133&rep=rep1&type=pdf

An aspiring doctor should major in a science-related field like biology or chemistry:
“Statistical analysis of grades in the first two years of medical school, clinical performance in the third year, and part I and part II National Board Medical Examination scores revealed no significant differences across three class replications. Residency selection among graduating seniors was also independent of undergraduate major” – https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7382038

People who hate school do poorly:
“This study, by analyzing the PISA 2003, 2009, and 2012 datasets, finds virtually no direct relationships between students’ general attitude toward school and their academic achievement in reading and mathematics.” – http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1041608016302102

Well-off people are happier than not-well-off people:
“Results showed that the Rural Himba group had significantly higher levels of life satisfaction compared to the Urban Himba, and both Himba groups had significantly higher life satisfaction scores than a sample of UK adults matched for age and gender with the Himba.” – http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886916310492

Hard work, not intelligence, is the critical factor to success:
“This article presents the research evidence that GMA predicts both occupational level attained and performance within one’s chosen occupation and does so better than any other ability, trait, or disposition and better than job experience.” – http://www.unc.edu/~nielsen/soci708/cdocs/Schmidt_Hunter_2004.pdf

Poor students suffer from having worse teachers than rich students:
“Although children from wealthier families outperform children from poorer families on achievement tests, a new study from Mathematica Policy Research finds that teachers of low-income students are nearly as effective as teachers of high-income students, on average.” – https://www.mathematica-mpr.com/news/teacher-effectiveness

People with health insurance are healthier than people without health insurance:
“This randomized, controlled study showed that Medicaid coverage generated no significant improvements in measured physical health outcomes in the first 2 years” – http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa1212321#t=abstract

Media outlets have large political biases:
“Specifically, with the exception of political scandals, we find that major news organizations present topics in a largely non-partisan manner, casting neither Democrats nor Republicans in a particularly favorable or unfavorable light.” – https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2526461

Red meat consumption increases cardiovascular risk:
“The results from this systematically searched meta-analysis of RCTs support the idea that the consumption of ≥0.5 servings of total red meat/d does not influence blood lipids and lipoproteins or blood pressures.” – http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/105/1/57.abstract

There are some jobs that only humans will ever be able to do:
“Turning to radiology, the birds proved to be similarly capable of detecting cancer-relevant microcalcifications on mammogram images.” – http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0141357

Gut microbiome can explain a lot of body functions, like psychological health:
“We found no significant associations between microbial markers of gut composition and diversity and scores on psychiatric measures of anxiety, depression, eating-related thoughts and behaviors, stress, or personality in a large cohort of healthy adult females.” – http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0170208

After Ferguson, there were more/less police shootings:
“However, after testing a variety of model specifications, we find no evidence that the number of fatal police shootings either increased or decreased post-Ferguson.” – http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0011128716686343?journalCode=cadc

Waiters, who get paid $3/hr, would support raising the minimum wage:

“But in Maine, servers actively campaigned to overturn the results of a November referendum raising servers’ hourly wages from $3.75 in 2016 to $12 by 2024” – https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/06/27/maine-tried-to-raise-its-minimum-wage-restaurant-workers-didnt-want-it/?utm_term=.6483f7cbb503

Race and gender-blind hiring policies would raise the number of women and minorities hired:

“It also means that introducing de-identification of applications in such a context may have the unintended consequence of decreasing the number of female and minority candidates shortlisted for senior APS positions” – https://pmc.gov.au/sites/default/files/publications/beta-going-blind-to-see-more-clearly.pdf