Abstract
An article recently published in The American Sociologist argued that social scientists are biased because of their liberal views, and that this social activism might in turn explain the growing distrust of conservatives in the scientific community observed in the General Social Survey. Although I do agree that social scientists in the United States are mostly liberal, which is hard to contest given the accumulated evidence, this does not necessarily mean that liberal scientists are biased. It is one thing to adopt liberal views, but it is quite another to let these views distort scientific productions to the point that they are not scientific anymore. Since no systematic evidence currently exists to support this claim, the “liberal bias” remains a myth. Moreover, the authors do not report any statistical correlation between the purported increase in social scientists’ activism and conservatives’ growing distrust in science, let alone a causal relationship. I hypothesize that the authors, as conservatives, are more concerned with liberalism than with the politicization of science per se, and that their critics are aimed at challenging liberals’ domination within academia by depicting liberal scholars as pseudo-scientists.
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Notes
Regarding Trump’s views on climate change, see http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/11/what-trump-can-and-cant-do-all-himself-climate. On the relations between Trump and anti-vaccine activists, see http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/11/trump-met-prominent-anti-vaccine-activists-during-campaign.
As Robert J. MacCoun explained, “the prototypical cold bias is unintentional, and unconscious, and it occurs even when the judge is earnestly striving for accuracy. The prototypical hot bias is unintentional and perhaps unconscious, but it is directionally motivated – the judge wants a certain outcome to prevail” (MacCoun 1998, p. 268). The last type of bias, skeptical processing, occurs when “the judge interprets the evidence in an unbiased manner, but her conclusions may differ from those of other judges because of her prior probability estimate, her asymmetric standard of proof, or both” (MacCoun 1998, p. 269).
One way to distinguish them is to compare the political reputation of a research field with the actual political orientations of the researchers. For instance, evolutionary scientists are generally thought as conservative, and even sometimes racist. In fact, “some of the highest-profile evolutionary behavioral scientists of the twentieth century, including Robert Trivers (a member of the Black Panthers), John Maynard Smith (a registered member of the Communist Party of Great Britain) and E. O. Wilson (one of the world’s leading conservationists), favored (sometimes radically) liberal politics in their personal lives” (Tybur and Navarrete 2015, p. 40)
Although it is not my goal here to criticize this work, the content of the survey raises a number of methodological questions. First, willingness to discriminate is mainly asked in a hypothetical setting, which might have influenced respondents’ answers towards more harshness. But more importantly, the authors give no definition of “conservative social psychologist.” Does that suppose obvious political activism? Or does the unremarkable presence of conservative views suffice to be exposed to discrimination from liberal scientists? Since this problem is not explicited in the survey, respondents might have used different standards to answer the questions, thus rendering the results almost uninterpretable.
Apart from science, respondents were asked to assess their confidence in various social institutions: education, organized labor, executive branch of the government, press, medicine, television, supreme court, congress, military, organized religion, major companies, banks and financial institutions. Three main answers were available to the respondents: “a great deal,” “only some,” or “hardly any” (and “don’t know” or “refuse”). As summarized by Gauchat, “over the 36 years of the GSS, 40.8% expressed a “great deal” of confidence in the scientific community, 46.2% responded “only some,” and 6.6% expressed “hardly any” (Gauchat 2012, p. 172).
In Bourdieu’s Field Theory, social hierarchies are determined according to generic and specific types of capital. This means that certain types of capital are particular to a given field, such as science (Bourdieu 1975, 2004), religion (Bourdieu 1971) or fashion (Bourdieu and Delsaut 1975). For instance, the scientific field is mainly hierarchized around two specific types of capital: academic capital, that corresponds to the temporal dimension of science (directing a department, editing a journal, etc.), and scientific capital, that corresponds to the intellectual dimension of science (being a Nobel laureate, publishing in highly regarded journals, etc.). On the other hand, certain types of capital, such as political capital or social capital, are said to be generic because they are found in almost every fields (even though they might acquire different meanings depending on the state of the particular field in which they are deployed).
http://www.nationalreview.com/author/1852152/archive/2016. Consulted on August 4th 2017.
http://quillette.com/author/nathan-cofnas/. Consulted on August 4th 2017.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/dadaist-science/article/2008803. Consulted on August 4th 2017.
https://heterodoxacademy.org/2017/03/06/new-report-on-the-political-views-of-british-academics/. Consulted on August 4th 2017.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XazSfqrzPg. Consulted on August 4th 2017. In the same vein, Stefan Molyneux has also interviewed Charles Murray, co-author of The Bell Curve, and Nicholas Wade, author of the controversial A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History.
Politicization can be defined as “the process through which certain issues become objets of public contention and debate, and are thereby legitimated as concerns of the state or political realm. Politicization is therefore generally a contentious process, insofar as it introduces new demands for resources, justice, and recognition” (Calhoun 2002, p. 369).
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Larregue, J. Conservative Apostles of Objectivity and the Myth of a “Liberal Bias” in Science. Am Soc 49, 312–327 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-017-9366-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-017-9366-9