Explanatory Judgment, Moral Offense and Value-Free Science

Abstract

A popular view in philosophy of science contends that scientific reasoning is objective to the extent that the appraisal of scientific hypotheses is not influenced by moral, political, economic, or social values, but only by the available evidence. A large body of results in the psychology of motivated-reasoning has put pressure on the empirical adequacy of this view. The present study extends this body of results by providing direct evidence that the moral offensiveness of a scientific hypothesis biases explanatory judgment along several dimensions, even when prior credence in the hypothesis is controlled for. Furthermore, it is shown that this bias is insensitive to an economic incentive to be accurate in the evaluation of the evidence. These results contribute to call into question the attainability of the ideal of a value-free science.

Attitudes Towards Science

“…Other work has looked at acceptance of scientific evidence more generally, and found that acceptance was contingent upon how morally offended participants were by the evidence (Colombo et al, 2015). More specifically, participants were presented with various statements summarizing (made-up) scientific evidence across various domains, among which were statements summarizing research that found particular effects of nutrition on health and of gender on professional success.…”

Reactions to Male-Favouring versus Female-Favouring Sex Differences: A Pre-Registered Experiment and Southeast Asian Replication

“…Specifically, people may react less positively to claims about male-favouring sex differences than they do about differences favouring females. They may find the former harder to believe, and judge the evidence supporting them to be less persuasive (Colombo et al, 2016;Lord et al, 1979;Winegard et al, 2018Winegard et al, , 2019. Moreover, to the extent that they do accept the claims, they may view them as more unpleasant and potentially harmful, and prefer to chalk them up to nurture rather than naturein part because people often conflate "natural" with "good," and in part because people assume that, if the differences are due to nurture, they might then be more easily eradicated.…”

Reports of the Death of Value-Free Science Are Greatly Exaggerated

“…Instead, I want to concentrate on a recent attempt in this journal (Colombo et al 2016) to show, using scientific tools (specifically, studies of the type often performed in social psychology), that the biases of researchers rule out the Bpsychological attainability of objective, value-free scientific reasoning^. Colombo et al (2016) describe value-free science as follows:…”

“…However that may be, Colombo et al (2016) are of course right in stating in the following paragraph that in the sciences,^moral information should not affect the assessment of the evidence available for a hypothesis over and above the hypothesis's prior credibilityB, if they are to be considered value-free. They go on to note that Breasoning and valuing are obviously psychological processes^(italics in the original), and list a number of papers in the literature as supporting claims that prior beliefs Bpredict^explanatory judgements of research, that such judgement Bis often biased in subtle and intricate ways^, and motivational states Bcan influence many of our beliefs about the world.^Nevertheless, they point out that these studies provide weak support for the claim that non-epistemic values systematically affect the appraisal of the relation between a scientific hypothesis, data, and background knowledge, because they did not control for hypotheses' prior credibility and did not assess the extent to which accuracy incentives can mitigate the effect of directional goals.…”