Humans really, really, really want to find patterns, and sometimes find patterns where they may not exist. It requires care to avoid fooling one's self.
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"Pathological science" is a term coined by Nobel-laureate in chemistry Irving Langmuir in a presentation he made at General Electric's Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory a few years before his death in 1957. Langmuir described typical cases as involving such things as barely detectable causal agents observed near the threshold of sensation which are nevertheless asserted to have been detected with great accuracy. The supporters offer fantastic theories that are contrary to experience and meet criticisms with ad hoc excuses. And, most telling, only supporters can reproduce the results. Critics can't duplicate the experiments.
He gave several examples, including ESP experiments and Blondlot's N-rays, and stated that
Langumuir visited J.B. Rhine's lab at Duke University where Rhine was claiming results of ESP experiments that could not be predicted by chance and were probably due to some sort of psychic power. Langmuir found that Rhine was not counting all his data, however. He was leaving out the scores of those he believed were guessing their Zener cards wrong on purpose. "Rhine believed that persons who disliked him guessed wrong to spite him. Therefore, he felt it would be misleading to include their scores" (Park 2000, 42). Rhine determined that some of his subjects were deliberately guessing wrong because their scores were too low to have occurred by chance. "Indeed, he was convinced that abnormally low scores were as significant as abnormally high scores in proving the existence of ESP" (ibid.).These are cases where there is no dishonesty involved but where people are tricked into false results by a lack of understanding about what human beings can do to themselves in the way of being led astray by subjective effects, wishful thinking or threshold interactions. These are examples of pathological science. These are things that attracted a great deal of attention. Usually hundreds of papers have been published on them. Sometimes they have lasted for 15 or 20 years and then gradually have died away.
