It’s a question faced by scientists daily: if you found that X wasn’t associated with Y, would you report it? What if you found that treatment X was harmful to Y, would you report your findings? For example, let’s say you are an oncologist and you just concluded, based on years of research, that smoking wasn’t associated with cancer – would you report your findings? What if you were employed by the cancer drug’s maker or dealing with cancer personally, would you report your findings about treatment X then? Is it unethical to leave the results unpublished?
Questions of personal biases and valid science permeate all facets of science; of course, we as social scientists face these questions all the time in our research. Do personal biases get in the way of our science? Is there any way around our personal biases?
I’m a firm believer that the process of science allows us to eliminate many of the potential biases that we carry around with us. As Jay Ulfelder just pointed out in a blog post on Dart Throwing Chimp with respect to democracy research in comparative politics, the scientific process isn’t easy – there are often strong personal and professional reasons that lead people to stray from the scientific process (to me, sequestering results would imply straying from the scientific process). But, I would contend, the scientific process allows us to overcome many of our personal and professional biases. This is especially relevant, of course, to human rights research. As Jake Wobig just wrote,
“a person does not start studying human rights unless they want to identify ways to change the world for the better. However, wanting something to be so does not make it so, and we scholars do not do anyone any favors by describing the world incorrectly.”
I couldn’t agree more. I don’t think you have be neutral when it comes to your personal stance on human rights (you don’t have to be pro-human rights abuse either) to “do” valid human rights research. We don’t require oncologist researchers to be cancer-neutral or pro-cancer when they carry out their research; in fact, it is often assumed that they are researching in pursuit of eliminating cancer. What is required, however, is information that allows us (a) to understand how the researcher utilized the scientific process and (b) to replicate the researcher’s results. The same holds, I would contend, with research on human rights or democracy or any other phenomena that I might advocate for when I’m off the clock as a researcher: I can carry those biases to the door of my office, but I better “put on my science cap” and actually carry out – and report- my research as a scientist. I’m not saying this is easy, or even 100% achievable, but I do think that it needs to be discussed more. As part of this discussion, perhaps we need to focus more on outlets where researchers can actually publish null-results or other ways in which we can ensure that null-results do not get relegated to an online appendix.
I’m not alone in my stance on this: Rhiannon Morgan and Bryce Turner have an excellent edited volume on the topic (which both my undergrad and grad classes at Mizzou are reading for this week’s classes) where they outline the “epistemological tensions” in social science research, going as far back as Max Weber’s discussion of value-free versus value-relevant research. To cut to the chase: Morgan and Turner (2012), along with Carey and Poe (2004), Landman (2006), and others in the discipline argue that valid scientific research can be done, even by researchers who advocate for human rights in their down-time.
However, the onus is on us – the researchers –to ensure that we follow the scientific process and report our results – even if we don’t like them. And, sometimes, null results – or unexpected negative results – actually do the human rights promotion community a whole hell-of-a-lot-a good. Without people like Oona Hathway reporting on the lack of overall influence of human rights treaties on human rights performance we might not know as much about the conditions where they really do make a difference (see here or here). Similarly, if Dursun Peksen and Reed Wood hadn’t reported on the problems economic sanctions caused for human rights, perhaps more advocates would still be calling for sanctions as a human rights solution.
Without the scientific process, we really do become preachers instead of researchers and our cherry-picked results stand to harm any larger understanding of the processes of human rights abuse and the treatments that could actually help improve the world around us.
“Questions of personal biases and valid science permeate all facets of science; of course, we as social scientists face these questions all the time in our research. Do personal biases get in the way of our science? Is there any way around our personal biases?
I’m a firm believer that the process of science allows us to eliminate many of the potential biases that we carry around with us. …”
Of course science allows people to get around their personal biases; that’s the whole point of science as a formal, social, discursive, argumentative, agonistic, critical, collective process. Without this science has nothing. However, scientists can only ‘get around’ their own biases by making their experiments and reasoning public and having others reproduce their experiments and reasoning.
But let’s define ‘bias’ broadly. Is assay result X the product of a hitherto undiscovered protein or a contaminated batch of enzymes? Contamination is a ‘bias’ to the experiment in that it is an unwanted variable intruding upon the artificially purified experimental design. The scientist can take many steps to check, doublecheck and crosscheck their results but ultimately the only thing that will establish result X as a *fact* rather than an *artifact* is the experiment’s successful reproduction by other scientists in other labs around the world. An individual scientist’s personal preferences on the outcome of an experiment *may* prove to be an extraneous variable intruding upon the experimental design, that is to be determined. However, the way they overcome this is not by being ‘value neutral’ in their own minds as such, it is by designing their experiment as best they can and then submitting the whole process to critical peer review, which may or may not validate their claims.
No individual scientist can or should ever be ‘value neutral’ — if they didn’t care about the outcome of the experiment why would they bother doing it? The only ‘neutrality’ science can have emerges in its sociality, in its practices of argumentation — in being validated by numerous different values. It isn’t about ‘checking your biases at the door’ so much a not letting them intrude into your experimental design. ‘Values’ are not an item of clothing that you can arbitrarily hang up on a clothes peg — that’s a very poor metaphor, albeit a common one. Being ‘scientific’ is better described, I think as an ongoing process of drafting, redrafting and self-critique prior to the social critique of peer review. If your conclusions are based on nothing more than your own wishes and wants then your arguments will be undone as easily as pointing out a batch of contaminated enzymes. If the argument draws upon no more support than empty rhetoric then it’ll be quickly exposed as hot air. A strong argument requires more evidential and rational support than a statement of desires. Scientists needn’t *transcend* their values, they need only produce an argument that is *stronger* than the values that inspired it.
Human rights research has precious little in common with molecular biology and it can never follow the same scientific practices or adhere to the same standards (nor should it want to) but it can follow a similar process: produce arguments that are stronger than the values they are inspired by; produce arguments that can be validated by a wide range of value orientations.
So, no, a cancer researcher needn’t have any specific value orientation in the sense of being ‘pro-‘ or ‘anti-‘ cancer (though one would hope that it is not the former!) but nor can or should any researcher be ‘value neutral’ — our values get us out of bed in the morning. Wanting to produce objective knowledge about cancer: that’s a value in and of itself.