Are Scientists More Objective and Rational than the Rest of Us

No.  Not particularly.

 

In watching the new version of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos on TV, it was interesting to hear host and astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson wax eloquently how science is based almost entirely on empirical evidence – seemingly unbiased observation and clear experiments – as opposed to the ideas of the majority of the people who are under the sway of religious dogma and mythology as well as other forms of groupthink. 

But then the show began to give hints that scientists could be every bit as biased as anyone else. There was the bit about Robert Hooke trying to take credit for some of Isaac Newton's work. And then there was the story about Robert Kehoe, a respected scientist who became an oil industry lackey who pushed the idea that lead in gasoline was not dangerously polluting the environment and was not being found in increasing concentrations everywhere. It took the stubborn persistence of another scientist, Clare Patterson, to get the truth out.

When I was a kid, I wanted to be a scientist, and I idealized scientists as having the very qualities Dr. Tyson seemed to first imply that they had. Of course, that was long before I entered academia.

I had heard about how cutthroat and vicious academic politics could be. I should have asked myself why that was. 

I didn’t think of scientists in terms of outsized egos, outsized greed, biased experimental designs that were being used to guarantee the results of an experiment before it was even done, the shunning of those with data that seemed to contradict conventional wisdom - with scientists finding ways to prevent such folks from getting their data published in “respectable” journals through the misuse of the peer review process, or by preventing them from getting funding for further research - the use of propaganda and marketing techniques to disseminate pseudo-scientific “facts,” and the powerful effects of political correctness gone amok on what scientists can and cannot say or propose to study.

 

How stupid could I have been to idealize these folks as somehow above all that? When I finally made it to academia, I got to witness all that up close and personal. But it was even worse that I thought. When I started doing research for my last book, How Dysfunctional Families Spur Mental Disorders, I was totally shocked by how far all this went. Many of the issues involved have been the subjects of previous posts on this blog.

 

I came across an article by Michael Specter in the New Yorker about how one prominent scientist, Pasko Rakic, had set the field of neurobiology back a full decade by refusing to believe a lot of data coming out that disproved the prevailing idea that sophisticated animals – and certainly humans – are born with essentially every brain cell they will ever have, and that no new neurons develop during adulthood.  

Pasko Rakic

Scientists who found this data were ignored, and some had to leave the field in frustration. It took the persistence of a willful female scientist named Elizabeth Gould to break through this scientific version of stonewalling.

Elizabeth Gould

The whole subject of scientific groupthink and misbehavior will be covered in a book I recently became involved with as a co-editor – the sequel to the book Pathological Altruism. (It probably will not be out for a couple of years).

One of the most egregious examples of political correctness stymieing science is at the heart of my understanding of self sacrifice in dysfunctional families: the work of E.O. Wilson on sociobiology and kin selection. I had once had a conversation with an evolutionary biologist who told me that only about 20% of evolutionary biologists believed in kin selection, but he strongly implied (without actually saying so) that this was due more to politics that to the science.

E.O. Wilson

As I later learned, I had guessed exactly what was going on in the field, but I had no idea it stemmed from an official published opinion piece from 1975! In reading my colleague Gregg Henrique’s book, A New Unified Theory of Psychology, I learned the following on page 166:

“…on November 13, 1975, a group of fifteen or so scholars, teachers, and students from the Boston, area (most notably among them were Wilson's Harvard colleagues, Stephen J. Gould and Richard Lewontin) formed a group called Science for the People and published a let­ter in the New York Review of Books that said that any applications of sociobiology to humans were to be condemned because they were too politically, dangerous. The letter linked examining biological bases of human behavior to Social Darwinism and Nazi Germany. Even hypotheses stemming from such ideas...

‘consistently tend to provide a genetic justification of the status quo and of existing privileges for certain groups according to class, race or sex. Historically, powerful countries or ruling groups within them have drawn support for the maintenance or extension of their power from these products of the scientific community. . .These theories provided an important basis for the enactment of sterilization laws.. .and also the eugenics policies which led to the establishment of the gas chambers in Nazi Germany.’”

Stephen J. Gould

OK. So because a scientific idea might conceivably be misused in the service of some fascist’s political agenda, we cannot talk about it?!? And one of my previous heroes, Stephen J. Gould, signed on to this? 

How ironic that ideological groupthink, which is itself a manifestation of the biological force of kin selection, is being used to intimidate those who would study kin selection.

Such objectivity. Such empiricism. Rational scientists who deal with nothing but actual evidence?  I’m sure glad that there are at least a few of them still out there.

Groupthink How Even Scientists Con Themselves in Order to Fit In

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In his brilliant book, The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt argues convincingly that logic evolved in humans not to establish the truth about the world or to establish facts, but to argue for ideas that benefit the kin and ethnic groups to which we belong, as well as to maintain a good reputation within those groups. My colleague Gregg Henriques calls this the Justification Hypothesis: logic is used to justify our group norms.

Many of our beliefs are based not on facts or reason at all and in fact seem to be impervious to them. They are instead based upon either our groupishness (the opposite of selfishness). For almost all of us, it is generally more important for us to look right than to be right.

This type of reasoning appears at the level of the individual, where it is called defense mechanisms and irrational beliefs. It appears at the level of the family or kin group, where it is called family myths. It also exists at the level of cultural groups, where it is called theology. Or if it is not your particular brand of theology, then it is called mythology.

Another name for this phenomenon in general is groupthink.We cede the right to think for ourselves for the sake of our group, and we often try to discourage our intimates from thinking for themselves for the same reason.

Even scientists are not immune. So what are some of the mechanisms by which they do this to themselves and to other people? That is the topic of this post.

First, a brief review of some previous posts. As I described in one post, I realized a long time ago that the so-called defense mechanisms discussed by the Freudians and the irrational thoughts catalogued by cognitive therapists (CBT) had a purpose that was not only intra-psychic but interpersonal as well. 

Defense mechanisms are defined as mental processes initiated, typically subconsciously, to avoid ideas or impulses that are unacceptable to our value system, and to avoid anxiety. Another name for this is mortification. We may, for example, compulsively try to act in the opposite way that the unacceptable impulse would dictate (reaction formation), or displace our anger from one person onto another, safer one.

Their interpersonal purpose is to screen out beliefs and impulses that are threatening to the kin group, which is also why they are threatening to the individual within the kin group.

The irrational thoughts of CBT, which they attributed to humans being basically irrational, also functioned much like the defense mechanisms. If you, for example, "catastrophize" about what might happen if you indulged an impulse that your kin group does not approve of (by, say imagining the worst possible outcome of doing so), you will indeed scare yourself away from engaging in it. (Of course, the CBT folks reject the whole concept of defense mechanisms - I recall a somewhat sarcastic reply from cognitive therapy pioneer Albert Ellis when I brought this up at one of his talks).

On a related note, there are the logical fallacies that are enumerated by logicians and which are well known to members of college debate squads. An example is post hoc reasoning, which assumes wrongly that if event A is quickly followed by event B, then it is true that A caused B. I saw patients engage in many of these fallacies when confronted with the negative consequences of the behavior that seemed to be demanded of them by their families. So, I believe, the logical fallacies can also be used as defense mechanisms - specifically designed to avoid troublesome questions about cherished beliefs that on the surface are simplistic at best and preposterous at worst.

As mentioned above, scientists are not immune from groupthink and groupishness. In fact, they are as nearly as likely as anyone else to employ them. I witnessed many times in scientific debates how the debaters would subtly employ various techniques and mind tricks to silence critics of their studies or ideas.

A few examples among many:

a) Black-and-white, or all-or-none thinking. Biological psychiatrists seem to think that everything in the DSM diagnostic manual is a brain disease, whereas the anti-psychiatry folks believe that nothing is, and the listed diagnoses are all just alternate lifestyles, different ways of looking at the world, or reactions to trauma.

b) Arguments that advance the idea that, because many parts of the thinking of someone like, for instance, Freud, were totally off-base (like "penis envy" and his theories about homosexuality), that therefore ALL of his ideas were wrong (including such obviously real things as intra-psychic conflict and defense mechanisms).

c) Stating facts about the results of studies without describing certain contextual elements that put those facts in a different light. A great example I have already blogged about is how the leader of the National Institute on Drug Abuse spoke about experiments with monkeys showing them pulling a level to get cocaine until they died - while neglecting to mention that the animals were in solitary confinement with nothing else to do. When that was not the case, they behaved very differently.

d) Conflating the issue of how a phenomenon arises or what it means in the scheme of things with the issue of whether the phenomenon even exists at all. For example, CBT'ers would deny that the concept of resistance, a psychoanalytic idea that states that people are often highly invested in their psychological symptoms and resist change - is a real phenomenon. All the while, they failed to report in their case studies the high level of non-compliance with CBT homework assignments by their patients in treatment.

e) Grossly exaggerating the strength of certain research findings while completely ignoring the study's weaknesses and problematic assumptions.

f) Conflating another scientist's conclusion about the significance of a clinical anecdote with the description of the anecdote, and not considering what else the anecdote might mean.

g) Scientism: the idea that randomized placebo-controlled studies of something are the end-all and be-all of science, and that everything else is just anecdotal and not science at all. I answer those who make this argument by asking for volunteers for a randomized placebo-controlled study on whether parachutes reduce the incidence of deaths and injuries during falls from airplane flights. 

I also point out that scientism creates a problem when it is only a slight exaggeration to say that in order to study an important psychological phenomenon like self-deception with a large enough study sample and within a reasonable time frame, you would pretty much have to ask people about their opinion of themselves. Sorta defeats the goal of the study, doesn't it? So does this mean that therefore studying self-deception should be completely off limits to scientists? 

Scientists will often accuse other scientists of doing these things while doing them themselves. This is projection - another defense mechanism. These mental mechanisms are so pervasive in human beings that we are quite likely to find at least some of them in any scientific discussion. 

Discerning readers will no doubt find examples in which I do some of it in my posts on my blogs.