>Instead of giving in to a gut reaction, you should read the paper. All research must get funding in one way or another. If you exclude research due to funding sources and potential conflicts of interest, you wouldn't be left with much.

It makes sense to try and figure out what the funders would want the answer to be and see if the research matches that. If it does, shouldn't you be more skeptical?

For example, if Exxon funded research saying that global warming isn't caused by man or Walmart funded research saying that raising the minimum wage causes mass unemployment then it's pretty clear that they would benefit from the result.

In this example it looks like these companies probably just want to be associated with MIT (or they have an interest in other pieces of research) and I can't see any particular reason to suppose that they'd be invested in the outcome of this study in particular.