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August 10, 2024 - 8:00am
Scientists’ forays into politics are hurting their credibility, according to a new study from the Munich Society for the Promotion of Economic Research.
The study’s participants viewed politically neutral scientists as more credible than those who made their political affiliations known, the study found. Researchers created synthetic academic profiles of researchers imbued with political beliefs based on real tweets from scientists. Participants found academic profiles with Left or Right-wing political views less credible, especially those who took strong political stances.
X, formerly known as Twitter, has become a key platform for scientific researchers to gain visibility for their work. X mentions of papers published in general interest journals have grown about 25-fold since 2011, but that can take a toll on credibility. Scientists’ posts are significantly more political than those of the average American, with 44% of their posts containing non-neutral political content, compared to 7% for the general population.
The impact of public political stances was not equal for both Left and Right-leaning researchers. Strongly Republican scientists were considered 39% less credible than neutral scientists, while strongly Democratic scientists were only considered 11% less credible than neutral scientists, the study found.
While Democrats were very sceptical of the credibility of Republican scientists, they viewed politically neutral and Democratic researchers as equally credible. Republican respondents preferred moderate Republicans researchers to neutral researchers, though they were very sceptical of strongly Republican scientists, in contrast to Democratic respondents, who viewed strongly Democratic scientists as credible.
The politicisation of science has accelerated in recent years, most notably with several high profile scientific magazines endorsing Joe Biden in 2020. Scientific American urged readers to vote for Biden in the first endorsement in its 175-year history, praising his fact-based plans to “protect our health, our economy and the environment” and writing that Trump “rejects evidence and science”.
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SubscribeSurely this should be “apparently neutral”.
Scientist don’t damage faith in science by social media use but by not approaching issues in a properly scientific manner. Of course if you highlight your biases on social media that will draw attention to the fact that those biases are likely to affect your work.
Yes, exactly. I’d rather that than having them hidden.
Yes, that’s the problem.
An interesting longtitudinal study would test whether the claimed neutrality of scientific research stood the test of time. Or whether the general public were right to doubt its neutrality.
Where the content is itself “political” in a broad sense (eg in psychology, social sciences) or where a subject is dominated by particular political positions, I would doubt its neutrality.
These days the largest correlation between “neutrality” and reality would probably be citations, one of the key performance metrics because of the link to funding and QS rankings. Have watched this being manipulated real time in an HE institution. This year it risked falling outside of the elite global rankings …. boy they scrambled.
Well, we are always judged by the company we keep …
Scientists are just as good at using fallacies to justify their actions as the rest of us.
Sadly not just in the USA.
We were brought up to believe in evidence based practice and research un-influenced by personal or political opinion or desire.
Even if you don’t like the answers.
Who wrote the headline for the article? It is quite obvious that the study had nothing to do with social media use, but with scientists’ political commitments.
A significant amount of output from scientists is infected with political ideology. It always has been and always will, because people’s world views affect their methodology and findings, and individuals fear censure from colleagues for going off piste.
I’m less worried about scientists with political biases on social media than I am scientists who aren’t active on social media but nonetheless obviously still take their biases into the research.
I’ve lost track of the number of papers I’ve read on some anthropological or sociological topic, where the ‘Discussions’ and ‘Conclusions’ section of the paper is the political progressive spin possible on the actual research results. That’s without even questioning the methodologies or research questions themselves.
I can’t take any politically-sensitive claim on those topics at face value anymore unless I read go through the paper itself with a comb. It’s exhausting.
The impact of public political stances was not equal for both Left and Right-leaning researchers. Strongly Republican scientists were considered 39% less credible than neutral scientists, while strongly Democratic scientists were only considered 11% less credible than neutral scientists, the study found.
.
Far-right scientists are BAD people and boxer Imane Khelif is a woman!!!
Circular.
When scientific findings become adopted or rejected by political groups, science itself is politicised and formerly neutral studies acquire left- or right-leaning associations, along with the scientists who originally made them without knowing which political group would latch onto their research.
Climate change – initially non-partisan issue (for non Greens) now adopted by the left.
Covid lockdowns – initially non-partisan (outside China) now vilified by the right.
Assuming that the participants were evenly divided in their own political affiliations, as is the electorate, the important and rather miserable point is that the Left have overwhelming control not just of our ‘culture’ but of our ‘science’, too.
Or I suppose you could say “the Left still has control of the microphone.”
Woe is me.
The science in any area of research is never ‘settled’ it is always provisional. But try telling ‘climate scientists’ that.
I’m not so sure this is true, especially in the natural sciences. It is very, very unlikely a paper is going to come out tomorrow that disproves plate tectonics, or genetics, or the Big Bang….etc. Somethings become established and are subsequently built upon by so many other empirical results, that to ‘unsettle’ them would require re-explaining dozens of different phenomena from first principles.
What does often happen is that established theories can be expanded upon or recontextualised in a way that might completely change how we think about the theory, but nonetheless leaves almost all of the empirical predictions, observations and implications of the theory intact. Einstein’s work on relativity, spacetime and quantum mechanics dramatically recontextualises gravity – it was never going to upend Newtonian physics to the point that we start thinking the Earth is the centre of the solar system again or even that our orbital predictions were massively wrong. Science reporting can make it seem old science has been completely rewritten, but this is almost never what happens.
On climate change, the fundamental idea that going from 280ppm of CO2 to 422ppm of CO2 in less than 200 years is going to have dramatic climatic consequences is settled science. Further details can and will be revised, but a lot of that is just elaborating on that basic, settled idea.
I think science is a lot more fluid than you do. In biology, for example, the fundamental basis of biology for 160 years — Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection — now seems nonsense. Among other things, during the pandemic we used the latest genetic sequencing technology to track the evolution of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and what we saw was not Darwinian. No one can explain it.
We don’t know what we don’t know, but we know we don’t know a lot. Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein each presented great analogies for what our discoveries so far have been.
Isaac Newton: “I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”
Albert Einstein: “The human mind is not capable of grasping the Universe. We are like a little child entering a huge library. The walls are covered to the ceilings with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written these books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. But the child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books – a mysterious order which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects.”
Same with climate change. It’s far from settled. Those people who think they understand how the complex adaptive system of the earth’s climate will react to the greenhouse gases people put in the atmosphere don’t.
Evolution by natural selection is nonsense?
I really really doubt that you’d find any significant number of biologists who agree with that. Darwin’s main contribution to biology was the idea that species change over time as a consequence of inherited differences in fitness (‘fitness’ in this context just meaning how successful an organism is at surviving to reproduce).
This explains extremally well the 500+ million year fossil record. You see aquatic organisms with robust pectoral and hind fins transition to organisms capable of moving on land with four limbs, and you see them transition to laying eggs outside of the water…etc…etc.. Even today, you see remnants of our evolutionary history in the process of embryo development across species (e.g. dolphin embryos grow stubby legs, before other genes activate to suppress them)
There is no other theoretical framework for explaining all the observations we see. Even if ‘God did it’ – god would have had to have really wanted us to believe natural selection was a thing.
And even if you don’t accept fossils, natural selection is just a logical consequence of variation and inheritance. If 10% of a population have one genetic trait, and 90% have another, and that 10% is better at surviving and ultimately reproducing, then that 10% will grow generation after generation at expense of the 90%. You get the same process in any self-replicating system (e.g. lots of AI uses this principle to learn over time).
That all being said, rapid, generation-to-generation changes in the genome of an organism are subject to ‘noise’ and random chance. It can take hundreds of generations and a stable selection environment to see underlying trends bare-out. I’m not sure what you’re referring to with covid, but would suspect its that (or else, there are selection forces at play which are not understood – which doesn’t disprove natural selection anymore than getting maths wrong disproves maths).
Those quotes are great…but my point was about how scientific development works in practice, not how scientists chose to wax lyrical about it. Most Newtonian physics still stands.
As I said, the details of climate change may be fleshed out but more CO2 > hotter planet is extremally well supported. That’s not even a theory, it’s an empirical fact what the properties of CO2 in an atmosphere are (any atmosphere…this also happens on Venus), as is the empirical fact we’ve gone from 280 parts per million to 422 very quickly relative to geological time. The major feedback cycles that counteract this are well understood to the first order of magnitude. Scientists know about mountain weathering turning CO2 to carbonate rocks. They know about oceans absorbing CO2. They know about the rates at which CO2 is uptaken by plants.
Throwing your hands in the air and saying “it’s a complex system and we’ll never be able to settle the most basic of truths about it” sounds appealing, but holds less water as you learn about all the empirical observations and variables scientists are extremally confident about.
Yes, evolution by natural selection is nonsense, in my opinion. You are right that biologists don’t agree with that, but none of them have any explanation that holds water for how a simpler organism can evolve into something more complex.
The neo-Darwinist theory of evolution was formulated to fix the holes in Charles Darwin’s original theory, but that didn’t help much. Any theory that depends on natural selection acting on random mutations is as leaky as a sieve. Nature can’t create complexity.
That’s my area of scientific competence — causation in complex adaptive systems. I do a lot of work on models. My work is kind of a cross of the work on causal inference by people like Judea Pearl to the work on complex adaptive systems by people like Stuart Kauffman to try to develop a replacement theory for neo-Darwinism.
I’ve been unsuccessful to date, but I’m still hopeful. “God did it” is not a theory I am exploring. Complexity theory is too complex to get into much in a comment like this, but I wish more people were thinking about how it discredits Darwin. But to dismiss Darwin will damage your career, so people don’t.
The evolution of biology is a lot like the evolution of technology, so I am discussing it in my book on how to drive more innovation in the carmaking industry. An analogy I came up with that shows the limitations of Darwin’s theory is this.
Imagine you have the Wright Flyer I of 1903, arguably the first airplane ever flown. You can trace the evolution of that airplane over more than 100 years to the F-35 fighter, arguably the most advanced airplane in existence today. As a thought experiment, can you imagine how endless iterations of random mutations and natural selection could have bridged the gap between the two?
I can’t. For one thing, the Wright Flyer I was a biplane with wings made of muslin (the Pride of the West muslin, used in making ladies’ underwear) and wood (ash and spruce). The F-35 is a monoplane with wings made of advanced composites of metals and carbon fibers designed to be stealthy to radars. How do you randomly go from the original materials to the more complex? You don’t.
Take the flight control systems of the two airplanes. The Wright Flyer I had some simple levers attached to wires that the pilot used to control the yaw, pitch and roll of the airplane. The F-35 is controlled by a computer in a sophisticated fly-by-wire system that runs tens of millions of lines of code. How do you randomly go from an airplane with no computer to one with a computer running all that code? You don’t.
Yet the evolution of the Wright Flyer I to the F-35 is trivial compared to the evolution of the single-celled organisms that were the most complex thing on earth for billions of years to the unimaginable complexity of the human body with its brain.
I won’t get into the evolution of the SARS-CoV-2 virus variants but let me say a few words about climate change. You are right that increased CO2 in the atmosphere will cause more heating than if it weren’t there. But that doesn’t mean that the increased temperatures we see are caused by increased CO2. We just don’t know what causes what.
For example, if you build a climate model to just model increases in CO2 and see what the results are, you get only modest warming from the CO2 increases we expect. That is because the increase in temperature as CO2 increases is logarithmic, not exponential.
The only way modelers can get to dangerous temperature increases is by modeling positive warming feedbacks from other things in addition to CO2 increases. But that’s all speculative. Some people, like Richard Lindzen, believe that negative feedbacks are more likely, and they mute warming.
The science of global warming is far from settled. But for a scientist to challenge the alarmist view does damage to their career, so most don’t. That’s sad to see.
Climate science is the Book of Revelation for the religion of science, filled with doom and apocalypse for all unbelievers.
Same issue with journalism.
When I seek information, I want GOOD and reliable information that is unbiased.
If I think it is biased I discount it or ignore it altogether.
The priorities of science in academia
1. Getting the next grant
2. Keeping within the orthodoxy so that you get the next grant.
3. Getting published so that you can stroke your ego and get the next grant
4. Science
I wish I could upvote this a thousand times.
Except it’s not true. A large minority now gaslight their colleagues on gender and race, DEI …. The entire fabric of many disciplines has been corrupted. Ornithology as white supremacy etc
Being well thought of (bien pensantry) and travel opportunities are also important motivators.
Remove last line, please
You nicely identify the problem. I’m not sure there is a good solution.
Funding by grants and giving tenure for publishing gives rise to abuse and gaming, and so does peer review. But while I hear a lot of complaints about the system scientists must labor under, and everyone seems disillusioned by it, no one has any solutions that seem both feasible and likely to work.
It reminds me of the fable The Mice in Council. They all complain about the marauding cat, and finally one mouse comes up with a plan — bell the cat so the mice can hear it coming. “But who will bell the cat,” one mouse asks. Silence.
There’s a simple answer to science bias. Stop having the government paying for biased research. It’s like a study on whether people present their boss what he wants to see.
What’s a woman ?
Ask TtK. Or maybe not.
I’d be interested in what a survey of gender issues research would throw up.
A career of applied science has given me a ringside seat on the progressive erosion of scientific credibility. Those who have been paying attention are familiar with significant issues with the validity of research exemplified by what is known as “the replication crisis”, by exposure of unsettling amounts of outright research fraud, by the failure of prestigious journals and institutions to render credible oversight, and by perverse monetary and career incentives in the scientific research apparatus. Ethically and morally, we have degenerated from scientists like Jonas Salk, discoverer of the polio vaccine, who stated in a 1955 interview, when asked who owned the patent for IPV, he replied: “Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?” Who could imagine such a benevolent gift of intellectual property to humanity today?
“Science” today is drifting into the same state as the mid-16th century Church in Europe. It holds a monopoly on truth and reality. It renders obscene wealth to its highest priests. It bases its credibility upon miracles and authority, the former which are too often bogus and the latter enforced by threat of utter doom. It insists that ordinary people are not qualified to think for themselves and should defer to them in every aspect of their lives. It has its own vestment: the white lab coat having replaced the alb.
When 81 Nobel prizewinners endorsed Joe Biden in 2020, I thought that was beyond the pale. Will someone who doesn’t like Joe Biden be welcome in their labs? Many academic institutions require DEI statements and other liberal shibboleths of applicants. A vocal political conservative is probably going to be a pariah in any research group in a scientific institution today.
As I have mentioned before, I wanted to apply for a government grant to do electric car research and was told that the DEI portion of the grant application was the most important part! Our group is three white men. We didn’t even bother to apply.
Munich Society for the Promotion of Economic Research.
Also known as the University of the Completely Bloody Obvious.