What are the Dangers for Science?

One of the primary missions of universities is the creation of new knowledge through scientific research. Is a political imbalance a threat to this mission? New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once warned that “Ideological certainty easily degenerates into an insistence upon ignorance.” And Jose L. Duarte, Jarret T. Crawford, Charlotta Stern, Jonathan Haidt, Lee Jussim and Philip E. Tetlock argue that political dominance threatens the self-correcting tendencies of science. They use the field of social psychology to illustrate three main dangers of ideological dominance: skewed topic selection, biased methodologies and misinterpreted results.

Skewed Topic Selection

University faculty have unparalleled freedom to determine what topics they will research. Even if potential topics hold differential appeal to researchers of differing political leanings, this aspect of academic freedom will ensure that all relevant topics will be adequately researched, so long as the faculty is ideologically diverse. But, if a field is politically imbalanced, academic freedom can lead to distorted research topic selection. For example, left-leaning researchers may be more likely to investigate prejudice against women and minorities, while right-leaning researchers may be more likely to investigate prejudice against Christians. If left-leaning researchers are dominant, prejudice against their favored subpopulations gets explored extensively, while prejudice against other subpopulations is neglected.

Biased Methodologies

Methodologies can also be warped by political uniformity when biased views are embedded in theories and assumptions. Duarte et al. cite a survey in which participants agreed that the phrase “the efficacy of hard work” was a “rationalization of inequality.” Another group regarded disagreement with the statement, “If things continue on their present course, we will soon experience a major environmental catastrophe” as denial of ecological reality. As Duarte et al. point out, “the core problem with this research is that it misrepresents those who merely disagree with environmentalist values and slogans as being in ‘denial.’”

Misinterpreted Results

The combined effect of skewed topic selection and biased methodologies often yields unreliable conclusions. For example, as the researchers point out, “a long-standing view in social-political psychology is that the Right is more dogmatic and intolerant of ambiguity than the Left,” but this conclusion is probably the result of only looking at topics where the right is more dogmatic than the left.

The end result of these three issues is a skewed research environment and less reliable scientific output.