It's not just drug trials, it's a huge proportion of biology and psychology research at least. Additionally, most research in biology is expensive to get off th

It's not just drug trials, it's a huge proportion of biology and psychology research at least. Additionally, most research in biology is expensive to get off the ground, and in order to get funding it absolutely is important to project confidence - there's an entire game surrounding grant writing that sounds a lot more like "group 2" than "group 1". Group 1 is just a theoretical ideal, not the reality of academic science. While that may be somewhat field dependent it's definitely not restricted to a small niche either.