The Argument over Diversity in Science

 

The scientific environment has changed over the past year, with government agencies canceling previously awarded grants (something that would have been unheard-of before 2025) based on whether they addressed topics related to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Leaving aside the buzzwords for a minute, the focus of these projects was on understanding the experiences of people with a wide range of different life experiences, including some who may not have been well-represented in prior studies. Among my colleagues, some of the targeted grants investigated topics like the mental health of transgender adolescents, the acceptance of HIV prevention interventions, the best ways to promote health among Latino/Latina people, and smoking cessation among people from various gender groups. Researchers have been warned to avoid using certain words in their grant proposals going forward. Now, I recognize that there's political viewpoint diversity in society, and that some people just don't want public resources spent on topics that seem of interest to specific subgroups of people that aren't them. First, I'd suggest maybe re-reading my recent blog post on empathy! But second, let's be completely hard-headed about this and see what we might be losing as a society by not supporting research that seeks the perspective of smaller or more marginalized social groups.

My starting point for this argument is the premise that science is designed to seek truth. In other words, we don't do science to prove a particular pre-existing viewpoint, but to find out what might actually be true about the world. (I say "might be" because the scientific method is one that's always open to re-examining what we thought we knew beforehand -- nothing is ever completely settled, only reasonably well-accepted for the moment). The scientific method -- hypothesize, observe, draw conclusions -- is simple enough that we teach it to children. Yet it's also powerful enough to drive long-term historical progress toward a safer, healthier, wealthier, and happier society. Science is not a purely rational process: It capitalizes on tensions between the Narrative and Intuitive minds, including strategies like competition and peer review, to energize movement away from our fixed assumptions and toward a closer match between our beliefs and the reality we observe around us.

Next, let's look at a potential failure of the scientific method: Scientists get less innovative over the course of their careers, with the bulk of great scientific innovations coming from people in their 30s and 40s. This suggests that as scientists get more established, we are less likely to take on established paradigms and try radically new things. As a psychologist, I might suggest that this is because we are relying too strongly on established Narrative-level beliefs in our understanding of the world, and not keeping up the Intuitive-level interest that led us to creative ideas in the first place. Maintaining a "beginner's mind" takes effort and deliberate practice, particularly in an area you know well. An economist might suggest that older' scientists' intellectual conservatism is simply a manifestation of the well-known endowment effect, in which people become more risk-averse once they have more to lose.

This type of ossification of ideas leads to some not-so-subtle value judgments, such as the common characterization of different types of studies as “hard” versus “soft” science. Many researchers either implicitly or explicitly see the “hard” scientific studies -- with drug interventions, physiological data, etc. -- as more valuable, but that has the effect of obscuring some information that might nevertheless be important. Douglas Medin and Megan Bang’s book Who’s Asking?Native Science, Western Science, and Science Education (MIT Press, 2014) takes aim at a kind of myopia that afflicts scientists when we make strict “quality” judgments about scientific methods or ways of knowing. Medin and Bang are biologists, and they give an example of baboon behavior in which Japanese researchers observed baboons learning from one another how to wash a sweet potato prior to eating it. This was seen in settings where the baboons were allowed to interact freely with each other and with the researchers, something that’s typical in Japan. Medin and Bang note that the finding would not have been seen if the researchers had stuck with more “rigorous” Western scientific methods, where baboons are kept and studied individually, with much more restricted and controlled opportunities for social interaction with other baboons. This is a prime example of the risk that occurs when we have scientists who are all demographically similar to one another, and who approach every problem in the same way.

In the context of educational research, Medin and Bang noted differences in their own culturally based approaches to science (Medin is an older White man, Bang is a younger woman who is a member of the Menominee tribe – a sovereign nation under treaty with the U.S. government). “Medin’s focus on this project often has been on experiments (and pre- versus post-program results) on Native children’s conceptions of nature and of science. He saw recording [instructional] designer and teacher meetings as, at best, of secondary interest. Bang, in contrast, was drawing on a systems-level perspective from the start, and for her it would have been very strange to ignore what was going on in these meetings. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that Medin was doing Western science and Bang was doing Native science” (p. 226). Medin notes that as a graduate student, he worked in a lab that was in direct competition with other labs and that he was in fact forbidden to speak with the students in labs that were racing to be the first in discovering one ultimate scientific truth. Bang, on the other hand, was trained in a setting where Native and Western conceptions of ecology were in tension or conversation with one another, where the perspectives of different Native tribes came into play, and where there was significant cultural and historical context affecting people’s view of scientific knowledge. These differences in context can’t help but make people attend to different aspects of a scientific problem, and varied perspectives are often an asset to knowledge discovery.

Ideally science would value multiple perspectives as different lenses on truth; unfortunately, the history of science has more often prioritized some perspectives and devalued others. Medin and Bang write:

Consider an analogy with people and shoes. Imagine that science is a shoe and that, over time, the consensus developed among researchers is that the shoe should be a size ten and only a size ten. On this view, if you want to be a scientist you have to figure out how to make a size ten a good fit for you. If you happen to be a size six or a size fourteen, you face major challenges in making this work. In the same way a (Western) science unwilling to examine its (culturally infused) values, assumptions, and … [Western] epistemological frameworks may work to exclude minorities and unnecessarily homogenize science and science education, because it’s not the case that one size fits all (p. 240).

As seen in the baboon example, certain ways of doing science and thinking about science may lead to particular findings. If our goal is to produce truth, then science needs diversity. This means a wide range of people doing the work of science, and also a wide range of topics under study. To return to the health sciences topics from the top of this post, we need the perspectives of people who haven't been studied as much in the past, because those perspectives are most likely to challenge what we think we know.

I suspect that some of the underlying motivation for censoring certain scientific topics is based on not wanting to have our perspectives challenged. But that's what science is supposed to do. The only way we get a paradigm shift in science is by questioning what we think we know, looking for bits of information that don't fit our current understanding. Scientific studies that challenge existing perspectives are therefore some of the most valuable potential contributions to the total body of human knowledge. Studies that seem like potential outliers to our cultural norms or curent beliefs are in fact among the most likely to generate novel insights, and therefore of great value to society.