Embrace the power of AND

From Public perceptions of expert disagreement: Bias and incompetence or a complex and random world? by Nathan F. Dieckmann, et al.

Marginally interesting but unsurprising. Knowing the systemic forecasting errors to which "experts" are subject (see Tetlock et al), you would think the researchers would embrace the power of AND. From the abstract:

Expert disputes can present laypeople with several challenges including trying to understand why such disputes occur. In an online survey of the US public, we used a psychometric approach to elicit perceptions of expert disputes for 56 forecasts sampled from seven domains. People with low education, or with low self-reported topic knowledge, were most likely to attribute disputes to expert incompetence. People with higher self-reported knowledge tended to attribute disputes to expert bias due to financial or ideological reasons. The more highly educated and cognitively able were most likely to attribute disputes to natural factors, such as the irreducible complexity and randomness of the phenomenon. Our results show that laypeople tend to use coherent—albeit potentially overly narrow—attributions to make sense of expert disputes and that these explanations vary across different segments of the population.

Here's what the power of AND can do for you:

People attribute disputes among experts to Incompetence AND Bias due to financial or ideological reasons AND Irreducible complexity and randomness of the phenomenon

That pretty much covers it. Incompetence, Confirmation Bias and System Complexity are indeed at the heart of most disagreements and failures to replicate research. Doesn't matter what their intelligence, people seem to have it about right.