More
and more, I am coming to think that bias in academic scholarship is exactly
like what happens in prosecutorial misconduct in criminal law. One element of
that misconduct is confirmation bias. Not only is confirmation bias a problem
in most academic fields, but scholarly reactions, when you point out the bias,
are just like those of prosecutors who have been told that they have wrongly
tried and convicted a defendant. Just mention the possibility of bias, and
prosecutors and academics alike become defensive and hostile. Even when a court
orders a wrongly convicted person to be released, many prosecutors will not
apologize or support compensation for someone who has spent years on death row.
Things
are changing in criminal law. There are many books and articles on confirmation
bias and other problems that lead to the convictions of innocent people. It is
at this point a well recognized phenomenon. That is partly because of the serious
consequences of prosecutorial misconduct. Innocent people are in danger of
being executed or living the rest of their lives in prison. So people are
willing to pay attention.
In
general, in most areas of academia, the consequences of bad scholarship are not
as dire. Even if there is some connection between lies told about history, for
example, and lethal results for certain people, the connection is way down the
road. It is hard to prove a direct connection. That is probably the main reason
it is so hard to make corrections in many areas of scholarship. The failure to
do anything and to admit any wrongdoing does not seem so terrible.
There
does not seem to be any great problem, like potential loss of life, that would
motivate academics to take a closer look at themselves. In fact, it appears to
me that most scholars think there is no harm in a little lying about the
evidence, especially if it’s in a good cause. So what if we say Darwin was a
great humanitarian and we hide the fact that there is so much racism in his
work, as in his dividing the human family into a hierarchy of races? Where’s
the harm? We are promoting good antiracist ideas and we’re telling some white lies
about Darwin’s participation in this cause. We are not hurting anyone.
But
lies about history always have bad ramifications. They teach us to adopt
fraudulent methods of research and logic to support the lies. The lies hide how
easy it is to let racism slip into a system and distort the evidence. There may
be no immediate bad effects, but the long-range consequences can be
devastating. Just think of how Darwin naturalized and normalized genocide, and
tell me no harm was intended or resulted. The harm of proclaiming that the
extermination of lower races is inevitable and natural—nothing immoral about
it—has been tremendous. Too many scientists still think of western civilization
as the winning civilization and attribute its success to evolution; they think
the west is the endpoint of human evolution.
Just
try raising any of this with scholars. Like criminal prosecutors who are
convinced they can do no wrong, they will get angry, defensive, hostile. It is
impossible to have a rational conversation about any of this. Scholars,
especially of history and especially of the history of science, will not
readily admit that they suffer from confirmation bias or any other kind. Once,
it was that way in criminal law too. Neither the public nor prosecutors were
open to considering how bias leads to wrongful convictions. That has been
changing for a while now. Whatever it is that led to improvements in criminal
law, concerning the study of bias in investigations, we could use a strong dose
of that in the rest of academia.
©
2019 Leon Zitzer
