Ideology between the lines: Lay inferences about scientists' values and motives

Abstract

While philosophers emphasize the distinction between description and prescription, in practice people’s beliefs about contentious issues seem to reflect their normative commitments. Less is known about the way that people infer others’ ideology from their reports about matters of fact. In the context of scientific research on the heritability of intelligence, scientists’ normative views (Study 1a) and motives (Study 2) are inferred from the evidence they report–independently of their stated research objectives. Two pre-registered replications (Studies 1b and 3) revealed that these effects generalize to other contentious domains of behavioral and social science research. Thus, laypeople view social scientific inquiry as (partly) a guided pursuit of evidence in favor of scientists’ personal ideology.

Is the Political Slant of Psychology Research Related to Scientific Replicability?

“…While we did not find evidence of a liberal bias in scientific replicability in these data, perceptions of political bias still exist, both among laypeople (Hannikainen, 2018) and academics. For example, Eitan and colleagues (2018) found that academics (students and professors) believed that personal political beliefs slightly bias scientific research (Pearson r = .62) and that social psychology is biased against conservatives (Pearson r = .83).…”

“…For example, the sociologist Musa al Gharbi (2018) asserted that "ideologically-driven errors likely permeate a good deal of social research," and psychologist Jonathan Haidt (2016) considers "the rapid loss of political diversity, over the last 20 years, to be the second-greatest existential threat to the field of social psychology, after the 'replication crisis'." This perspective may be echoed by members of the general public as well, who believe research in the social sciences is partially geared towards obtaining evidence consistent with researchers' ideologies (Hannikainen, 2018).…”

And the winner is . . . ? Forecasting the outcome of others’ competitive efforts.

“…Three hundred participants (mean age = 37 years; 38% male) from Mechanical Turk participated in an online study in exchange for 30 cents. We aimed to recruit 100 participants per condition in Study 1B and Studies 2-5 following prior research investigating lay beliefs (e.g., Hannikainen, 2018;Klinger, Scholer, Hi, & Molden, 2018;La, Louis, Hornsey, & Leonardelli, 2016). A sensitivity power analysis with the same previously-described data simulation approach (i.e., 1,000 simulations of three conditions with 100 participants each) indicated that a sample of this size would provide 80% power to detect an effect (with an ANOVA) for the difference between the planned contrasts of Cohen's d = .41 and 60% power to detect an effect of Cohen's d = .33.…”

Whose Words Hurt? Contextual Determinants of Offensive Speech

“…Which psychological representations causally mediate the impact of identity norms on determination of meaning? Future research may benefit from discriminating between intuitive candidate explanations: for instance, (a) representations of intent , implicating mentalization about the speaker’s intent and motives (Baker et al, 2009; Hannikainen, 2019) and (b) representations of meaning , via contextual shifts in the linguistic meaning of particular terms (Holtgraves et al, 1989).…”