Researcher speaks up on pressure to conform
by Carl Wieland
Published: 17 November 2009(GMT+10)
The editor of Science journal has admitted that submissions that go against the trend (specifically mentioning the issues of evolution and anthropogenic global warming) have a hard time getting past peer review
According to Thomas Bouchard, a US psychologist famous for his research on twins
raised apart,1 even scientists
with good reason to believe that the majority are wrong can be silenced. The reason
is the huge pressure to conform, the “powerful human urge to belong inside
the group, to think like the majority … and to win the group’s approval
by trashing dissenters.”
Bouchard, being interviewed in the journal Science on his retirement,2 cited the example of Larry
Summers who resigned as president of Harvard University after an outcry over his
saying that discrimination alone doesn’t account for women’s lower representation
in math-based disciplines.
“Nowadays, I’m sure there are people who are not publishing stuff on
sex differences,” Bouchard says, adding that he sees self-censorship as a
“great danger”, where data is not published because it does not fit
the prevailing belief system. (See also Science journal
editor admits: Peer review censors against-the-trend papers.) “I
talk about those things in my class all the time—that males and females have
different interests; … in a sense, females have a broader and richer view
of life. There are a lot of people who simply won’t talk about those things.
Academics, like teenagers, sometimes don’t have any sense regarding the
degree to which they are conformists.” (Emphasis added.)
Academics, like teenagers, sometimes don’t have any sense regarding the degree
to which they are conformists.—Thomas Bouchard, University of Minnesota, renowned
for his psychological studies of twins reared apart.
A New York Times article about Bouchard’s views cited the case of
economist Robert Shiller, an expert on house prices.3 While an advisor to the US Federal Reserve, he became
deeply concerned about the bubbles developing in the US housing and stock markets.
But rather than shout from the rooftops in warning the Fed, he expressed his views
“very gently”. He said he “felt vulnerable”, because deviating
too far from consensus “leaves one feeling potentially ostracized from the
group, with the risk that one may be terminated.”
The New York Times article goes on to say that “conformity and group-think
are attitudes of particular danger in science … because progress often depends
on overturning established wisdom”. Bouchard was not suggesting that forming
a consensus view was wrong, but the problem lay in the peer-pressure silencing of
critics, saying that his field has “whole domains we can’t talk about”.
The NY Times article says that if “the brightest minds on Wall Street
got suckered by group-think into believing house prices would never fall”,
who knows about such bandwagons as global warming, saying sarcastically, “You
mean it might be harder to model climate change 20 years ahead than house prices
5 years ahead? Surely not—how could so many climatologists be wrong?”
People often ask us, “How could so many scientists be wrong” about evolution?
Easy! See Herd rule—Standing for truth
can be painful in a world in rebellion to its Maker.
Presenter of The Science Show, Robyn Williams, is a well-known atheist and stridently
anti-creationist. He was declared the Australian Humanist of the Year in 1993 and
is the author of Unintelligent Design—Why God isn’t as smart as she
thinks she is. (Publishers: Allen and Unwin, Crows Nest, NSW, Australia,
2006.)
Science journal editor admits: Peer review censors against-the-trend papers
The editor of Science journal, Bruce Alberts, was recently interviewed
on Australia’s ABC
Radio National The Science Show by presenter
Robyn Williams:
Robyn Williams: Of course you’ve got a tremendous overview
of the published papers, not only in your own journal but in other journals. Out
of 1,000 papers on climate change, how many can you remember that go against the
trend? Any?
Bruce Alberts: Well, I get lots of complaints from people who want
to publish papers saying climate change doesn’t exist, but they have a hard
time getting their papers published because they don’t pass peer review. So
there are actually very few papers that get published in the peer review literature
that seriously challenge in any way the basic hypothesis. As in evolution (we’re
at a meeting on evolution right now), there are always things you don’t understand,
and the creationists use those things you don’t understand, the ‘missing
links’, to challenge the whole idea of evolution. In the same way some people
use the few things we don’t understand (we never understand everything) to
challenge the whole idea of climate change. It’s not a valid way of talking
about science.4
Interesting that against-the-trend papers on anthropogenic global warming are treated
with the same disdain as papers critical of evolution. And note that Bruce Alberts’
final sentence above attempts to define against-the trend papers as “unscientific”,
thus with one fell swoop removing them from scientific discourse. See
“It’s not science”.
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References
- Bouchard and his colleagues studied 126 pairs of twins—including
74 pairs of identical twins—over a period of 20 years. “I found that
I loved working with twins,” Bouchard told Science journal in July 2009. “They’re
still amazing and a major mystery to me.” Return to text.
- Behavioral geneticist celebrates twins, scorns PC science,
Science 325(5936):27, 3 July 2009. Return
to text.
- Wade, N., Researcher condemns conformity among his peers,
The New York Times, <http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/23/researcher-condemns-conformity-among-his-peers/>,
23 July 2009. Return to text.
- Interview broadcast on 18 July 2009, transcript at
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/scienceshow/stories/2009/2629061.htm.
Return to text.
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