Newsletter

April 2002

Science as Politics by Other Means: Fact and analysis in an Ethical World

John Staddon

An Editorial on the relation between
objective and subjective, fact and value, belief and reality, in contemporary
psychology.

“We are all engaged
in writing a kind of propaganda…Rather than believe in the absolute truth
of what we are writing, we must believe in the moral or political positions
we are taking with it.” So wrote a couple of University of Pennsylvania
instructors in the Journal of Social History, quoted by columnist
John Leo. I recall my sometime colleague Stanley Fish saying (with the
air of reciting the obvious) “all teaching is seduction.” While many scientists
might quarrel with these two statements, relatively few would dispute this
recent comment in Science: “[In 1976] biomedical science — indeed
science in general — labored under a belief that scientific activity was
value-free and ethics free. The view that science does not make ethical
judgments was so pervasive that it essentially served as an ideological
basis for scientific activity…” (Rollin & Loew, 2001, p. 1831). The
implication, presumably, is that science does, or perhaps should,
make ethical judgments; that it is not, or cannot be, value-free.

Contrast this position with
“Nature consists of facts and regularities, and is in itself neither moral
nor immoral”, which is Karl Popper in 1950 stating what to him and his
contemporaries was obvious. But now, in the social sciences, and perhaps
also in some so-called “hard” sciences like biomedicine, understanding
nature is taking a back seat to ideology. Moreover, this is regarded by
many as both laudable and inevitable.

Even the psychological establishment
seem to be aware that there is some sort of problem. The March 2001 issue
of the American Psychologist contained an article by Richard Redding
that looked at the political/ideological affiliation of psychologists.
He found considerable uniformity: Liberals rule. Redding’s solution was
to call for greater political diversity in the field. Such a call will
certainly go unheeded – and so it should, for what business does the APA
or any other scientific (not to mention tax-exempt!) organization have
seeking to influence the politics of its members?

But Redding is right that
there is a problem, albeit not one of expressed political affiliations.
It also can be illustrated from the pages of the American Psychologist.
The lead article in the February 2001 issue is entitled: “An ambivalent
alliance: Hostile and benevolent sexism as complementary justifications”
by Glick and Fiske. The theme of the article is that “The equation of prejudice
with antipathy is challenged by recent research on sexism” (p. 109) Of
course both “prejudice” and “sexism” are terms that depend for their pejorative
force on an ideology, a set of values – values that are almost entirely
unstated in the article. Not that the authors are unaware of the power
of ideology. They are very critical of what they call “legitimizing ideologies”
– Rudyard Kipling’s “white man’s burden” takes quite a licking, for example.
But their own ideology is to them as water to the fish: invisible.

Here is a partial list of
the values that seem to be taken for granted by these authors:

1. Equality is the most important
   value and trumps all others. “Equality” (between the sexes, for example)
   is not defined but seems to amount to “identity.” Only if men and women
   are treated in exactly the same way in every situation can they be regarded
   as truly equal: “gender differentiation create[s] and reinforces[s] hostile
   sexism” (p. 112).
2. “Power” is important, but there
   is good power and bad power. “Good power” is the power associated with
   professional status and money. “Bad power” is the power associated with
   good looks, charm and sexual attractiveness. “Simply put, men typically
   rule, dominating the highest status roles” (p. 110) but “Benevolent sexism
   is disarming” (p 111) and “men often resent women’s perceived ability to
   use sexual attractiveness to gain power over them” (p. 112).

1. Stereotyping (not defined) is
   bad.
2. A professional career is better
   than being a housewife: “women who implicitly associated male romantic
   partners with chivalrous images…had less ambitious career goals, presumably
   because they were counting on a future husband for economic support” (p.
   111).
3. Sexual reproduction is problematic:
   “male-female relations are conditioned by sexual reproduction, a biological
   constant that creates dependencies and intimacy between the sexes…patriarchy,
   gender differentiation and sexual reproduction…create both hostile and
   benevolent attitudes toward the other sex” (pp. 111-112).
4. Patriarchy (not defined) is
   bad.
5. Intellectual elitism: Some beliefs
   (mine) should be respected, others (yours) are “false consciousness,” cf.
   “The role of stereotyping in system-justification and the production of
   false-consciousness,” a paper by Jost and Banaji cited with approval by
   the authors.

Some readers may be puzzled
by this list, since these so-called “values” are surely self-evident. Who
could be against equality, for gender roles, against lofty career goals,
and so on? But that is not the point. The point is that these claims are
not scientific facts, nor will they seem self-evident to many cultures
other than our own – or indeed to many subcultures within the United States.

What then is the solution?
Well, it has long been a convention in experimental work to separate factual
matter, the data, from analysis. Data appear in the Results section,
all else is reserved to the Discussion. And value judgements are
usually excluded altogether. I see no reason why these rules should not
be universally required in science. Thus, value-laden statements should
either be excluded from the research entirely or (lest we abolish much
of social psychology) stated in a responsible way. For example, “If you
believe that women should have exactly the same social role as men, then
our research shows that following things favor that objective and these
other things hinder it”…and so on. First the value-dependent premises,
then the data – or the reverse. The point is to separate facts and assumptions.
It seems pretty obvious that a conscientious effort to differentiate what
is fact from what is value is essential if social-science psychology is
to rise above the level of “politics by other means.”

References

• Glick, P., & Fiske,
  S.T. (2001). An ambivalent alliance: Hostile and benevolent sexism as complementary
  justifications. American Psychologist, 56, 109-118.
• Popper, K. (1950). The
  open society and its enemies. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Redding, R.E. (2001) Sociopolitical
  diversity in psychology. American Psychologist, 56, 205-215.
• Rollin, B.E., & Loew,
  F.M. (2001) Assessing the reviewers of animal research. Science, 294,
  1831.

1. The
   allusion is to Karl von Clausewitz’s famous comment in On War that
   “War is only a continuation of state policy by other means.”
2. University Bioethicist for Colorado State University.

Editorial
in Behavior and Philosophy, Vol. 29, 2001.