[jacob]

First, I'm not an expert in these things but I've read an interesting article in the Opinion Journal (related to Wall Street Journal) about Al Gore's Nobel Prize. The article is at OpinionJournal - It's Your Money

But although the article talks about global warming and if it exists, several clauses got my attention since they may be relevant also to our discussion here of science. It talks about biases and cascade effects of information. Here are a few quotes from this article (my emphasis):

How this honor [Nobel Prize - jacob] has befallen the former Veep could perhaps be explained by another Nobel, awarded in 2002 to Daniel Kahneman for work he and the late Amos Tversky did on "availability bias," roughly the human propensity to judge the validity of a proposition by how easily it comes to mind.
Their insight has been fruitful and multiplied: "Availability cascade" has been coined for the way a proposition can become irresistible simply by the media repeating it; "informational cascade" for the tendency to replace our beliefs with the crowd's beliefs; and "reputational cascade" for the rational incentive to do so.

It may seem strange that scientists would participate in such a phenomenon. It shouldn't. Scientists are human; they do not wait for proof; many devote their professional lives to seeking evidence for hypotheses (especially well-funded hypotheses) they've chosen to believe. Less surprising is the readiness of many prominent journalists to embrace the role of enforcer of an orthodoxy simply because it is the orthodoxy. For them, a consensus apparently suffices as proof of itself.

Wouldn't these cascade effects also affect scientists in the fields of parapsychology (both parapsychology researchers and skeptics)? And how would their effect be, in your opinion?