Hello there again.
Summer is in the rearview, and for someone who lives in Stark country, it means Winter is Coming. Ok, maybe not coming coming—fall is lovely here—but we all know the shit is around the corner. So, with a new academic year already in full swing, I thought I would reflect on my summer essays and highlight some of the responses. Really, I want to talk about one essay.
I wrote an essay on activism in science that generated lots of feelings among my admirers and critics alike. This essay was reprinted in the Chronicle of Higher Education and Ben Lovett wrote a companion piece on my Substack. Along the way I remembered a podcast comment by Alexa Tullett that I still disagree with, agreed with social media comments made by my friend Katy Milkman right until I started disagreeing, and got CCed on an angry email to an entire anthropology department.
I had spent months on that essay before I pressed the submit button. It wasn’t that it was so hard to write, it was that I couldn’t get the right handle on the topic. I have an allergic reaction to so-called activist-scholars, but I couldn’t put my finger on why. Did I have an unprincipled objection to activism, akin to a moral intuition that I was trying to justify to myself and others?
I say this because it is now trite to say that there is no such thing as value-free science. All scientists live in a culture and system that shape their values and priors, and it is naïve to think these values don’t bias scientists. The history of science is replete with cases of scientists imposing their worldviews and then saying they were being objective—IQ tests “proving” immigrants were dumb or doctors warning that higher education would wither adolescent girls’ reproductive organs. I accept this; it is inescapable.
So, given that we are all hopelessly biased, what should we do to make sure we discover pragmatic truths? One camp thinks we should lean into our biases, to make them explicit. This would be the activist camp, I guess. I say I guess because I don’t think many activists see their biases as biases, but as truths they need to fight for. The more sophisticated activists realize their social justice beliefs are biases but, again, because science cannot be value-free, they think the only honest move is to lean into the bias and argue for it loud and proud.
My former student Alexa Tullett—now a tenured professor at the University of Alabama and someone who I consider a mentor as well as student— said something on my Two Psychologists Four Beers podcast a while back that has stayed with me. In short, she suggested academia should be more like the legal system. If I understand her view, she believes scientists should stop pretending to be objective, fess up to their beliefs, and simply argue with others who have different views of the truth.
This is not a hypothetical because in some corners of science, this sort of back and forth does happen. Take the question of whether women face bias in STEM hiring. In 2012, Corinne Moss-Racusin and her colleagues sent 127 science professors a single job application that was identical except that half read an application from “John” and the other half, from “Jennifer.” The professors judged John more competent and offered him a bigger starting salary. This is bad and confirms what many of us already believe: Academic hiring is rigged against women. But three years later, Wendy Williams and Stephen Ceci ran a national experiment this time on 873 professor in biology, engineering, economics, and psychology who were this time judging identical tenure-track candidates who happened to be either men or women. They also found a bias, but this time the bias was reversed: a two-to-one preference for hiring the woman over the man. Two teams, similar question, opposite answers. This is Alexa’s world, and at first blush it looks great. The prosecution made its case, the defense made its case, and the rest of us get to judge.
