FEATURED
Climate science has been hijacked by philosophical globalism and alarmism, psychology research is controlled by gender, anti-racism, and decolonization ideologies, and unorthodox studies are shunned and blackballed.
So say Breakthrough Institute senior fellow Patrick Brown, Benjamin Lovett from Teachers College, Columbia University, and Andrea Clements, the assistant chair of East Tennessee State University’s Department of Psychology, in interviews with The College Fix and panels they have taken part in over the last year.
Ideological, political, and corporate interests now influence research and its outcomes, say the trio of scientists representing the fields of psychology and climate science.
Non-scientific goals can bias what research is selected for or denied publication by academic journals, and these biases in publishing ultimately influence what research is or is not performed, they say.
‘Left-leaning environmental philosophy’ dominates climate science
Climate scientists are “rewarded for basically signaling membership to the good team,” Brown said last summer while partaking in a panel at the Heterodox Academy’s summer conference. The “good team” in climate science, he said, embraces tenets of left-leaning environmental philosophy based on pantheistic principles, global governance, and redistribution.
This has resulted in decades of “policy-based science” over “science-based policy” and has led to climate scientists reorienting how they ask research questions.
“Rather than ask ‘What is the magnitude of the influence of climate change on the phenomena I’m studying relative to other relevant influences,'” Brown said, “researchers are incentivized to ask ‘How does climate change negatively impact the phenomena I’m studying?”
Additionally, Brown noted, findings challenging the impact of climate change on extreme weather events at the local level, discussions of “adaptation solutions,” and “concerns about the negative effect of overly restrictive energy policies” are all sidelined.
Psychological researchers expected to act as policy advocates
According to Lovett, who also spoke on a Heterodox Academy panel last summer, something similar is going on in psychology, as psychologists increasingly are expected to act as policy advocates to further certain initiatives pertaining to gender, anti-racism, and decolonization among other ideologies.
For those doing research, he said, this may translate to a sense that they have a “social responsibility to do research that would show certain things” or “find scientific research” to promote particular policy goals.
Some peer-reviewed journals in his and related fields, Lovett said, can actually be quite explicit about having criteria for submission and publication unrelated to scientific rigor.
One example he gave was the much publicized editorial from the journal Nature Human Behavior that he said “kind of warned potential contributors that their work might not get published or might be retracted or removed after being published if there was content that could reasonably be perceived to undermine the rights or dignities of an individual or group.”
“It’s hard to know exactly what it would entail, but if you were doing, for instance, research on gender differences and spatial rotation skills, it’s not entirely implausible that that could be taken to undermine the dignity of a group that…did not do as well on those sorts of tasks.”
Describing another example from his field, Lovett said the Journal of School Psychology “had a call recently for papers on contexts in which policies have negatively and disproportionately impacted minoritized children and families.”
“Not an unreasonable goal if you think about it superficially,” he said, “but let’s say that you conduct a study and you find that a particular policy actually benefited minoritized children and families. That issue wouldn’t be appropriate for your study, apparently. Based on the results, it actually wouldn’t fit that call for papers.”
Suspicions of corporate influence
Yet, fashionable social and political ideology are not the only non-scientific influences on the publication of scientific research, Clements said.
In a June presentation, as well as in a telephone interview with The College Fix late last year, Clements described how, since 2021, she has been trying to publish a review article proposing future research directions for the exploration of non-pharmachological treatment options for opioid addiction.
Instead of treating addiction with medication, she is looking at proposing a theory based on intensive personal connections applied either with medication or in lieu of medication, she said.
It has been her experience, Clements said, that if you propose research on non-pharmachological treatments for opioid addiction, journals will not publish articles regarding the suggestion, funding organizations will not provide money for your work, and colleagues will not collaborate with you.
“I don’t know if [this] is because pharmaceutical companies are well-funded and can lobby for themselves to have people on medication forever, but that’s my hunch,” Clements told The Fix.
Paths to reform
As for how biases in scientific publication can be corrected, Brown said it’s “ill-advised” for the government to engage in censorship or try to dismantle disfavored scientific projects through funding mechanisms.
More promising routes, Lovett told The Fix via email, likely come in the form of open science reforms like pre-registration, as well as adversarial collaborations.
“Beyond those,” Lovett wrote, “it’s up to individual peer reviewers to push back on tendentious interpretations.”
“Editors should pay less attention to reviewers’ recommendations about acceptance/rejection and pay more attention to reviewers’ reasonable suggestions for alternative interpretations of results. Often papers can be accepted with those alternative interpretations added.”
Moreover, Lovett noted it is important to make “distinction between the results of research and the way that those results are interpreted [italics in original].”
“My default assumption is that even on politically hot topics, the results of the study are being accurately reported, if they’re reported by actual researchers, preferably from known, legitimate institutions and in mainstream (non-predatory) journals,” he wrote.
“I don’t know how else to operate as a researcher,” he added. “I may see something that is a clearly impossible result (due to e.g., a math error), or be highly suspicious of a result that goes against lots of prior literature, but until then, my default assumption is that the results themselves are accurate.”
“On the other hand, on politically hot topics,” he wrote, “I generally find the interpretations of research results to be tendentious, without fully acknowledging other reasonable interpretations. That includes the authors’ own interpretations of the results in the ‘discussion’ section of the article.”
MORE: ‘Feminist Collective’ took over political science journal, prioritized DEI: report
