RUTHFULLY YOURS

Yet another major study claiming conservatism is caused by mental problems has been conclusively proven to be junk science.

The now-debunked study suggested conservatism is associated with conspiratorial thinking and “negativity bias.” But it proved impossible to replicate when tested by other researchers.

“We find no consistent evidence that negativity bias promotes right-wing ideology; promotes ‘closed’ values or personality traits, such as need for closure or (low) openness to experience; or interacts with political engagement,” researchers doing the debunking wrote in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Nature. “To support these null results, we conduct a series of data quality and robustness checks that suggest our data is comparable in quality to that of previous work and our results do not hinge on particular operationalizations or modeling choices. Indeed, our results are consistent with several recent studies that fail to replicate associations between physiological indicators of threat sensitivity and political ideology.”

Perhaps nothing confirms that the root of the crisis in science is government control as much as watching people with doctorates make mistakes that should be obvious to a freshman. The critical error of endlessly privileging hypotheses that coincide with progressive political preferences has become sadly common.

This isn’t the first time researchers have made exactly this mistake. In 2020, a major study in Science, another major peer-reviewed journal, that claimed conservatives were more likely to respond aggressively to stimuli couldn’t be replicated by independent researchers in a larger-scale study.

“We conducted a preregistered replication in which we used the original threatening images used by Oxley et al. and a very closely related measure of ideology. With roughly four times as many participants in our lab, we found no evidence that conservatives have a stronger physiological response to threat compared to liberals. To conclude, we find no evidence for the original claim published in Science,” Bert Bakker, a professor at the University of Amsterdam who conducted the new research, told PsyPost.

However, since the both studies fit a media narrative, they continue to be widely cited by the media as evidence that conservatives are aggressive, despite this simply being untrue. Creating and perpetuating such falsehoods damages the credibility of science as a whole, creating a politically biased and thus deeply flawed canon of knowledge.

These related crises of replication and of activism masquerading as science are getting worse. According to a 2020 DARPA survey of 2,500 social-science papers, 53.4 percent of social-science papers failed to replicate — that is, their results could not be verified independently by subsequent research and are thus effectively wrong– in 2009. By 2018, that number had risen to 55.8 percent. Flipping a coin would give you better odds than “trusting the science” in this case.

Lowered standards have resulted in the proliferation of entire fields of study that are so susceptible to confirmation bias that their journals repeatedly greenlight nonsensical hoax articles written in postmodern progressive newspeak. In one recent example, the right-wing comedian Steven Crowder was not only able to get an obviously satirical article entitled “Embracing Fatness as Self-Care in the Era of Trump” accepted in the top journal in “Fat Studies” by using a pseudonym, but was even invited to give a presentation on the article and to become a peer-reviewer for said journal.

What’s even more worrying is that research that fails the most basic tests of science is positively cited by scientists at the same rate as more-robust research. Even after a scientific paper has been retracted, the vast majority of citations are still positive! Effectively, today’s social science is not much better than astrology. It’s simply people backing biased claims with studies that cannot be replicated and are thus as useless as consulting the stars’ movements to explain human activity.

Virtually all social-science hypotheses that attempt to find dark psychological reasons for conservatism haven’t held up at all under peer review.

The progressive group-think mentality is the root of this problem among academics and is killing science on campus. Roughly 50 percent of the general public supports right-wing or conservative parties, but only 12 percent of academics do. In some social-science fields such as anthropology, up to 60 percent of college professors openly admit they would discriminate against conservative Evangelicals.

A different study found 90 percent of British universities have censored free speech on their campuses in the last year or prevented scientific research into areas deemed politically unpalatable to the political Left.

“It cannot have escaped the notice of anyone who has spent time in British academia, especially in the social sciences and humanities, that there is a sizable left-liberal skew,” Noah Carl, a researcher at Oxford University who wrote the report, said in a press statement. “Moreover, growing evidence from the empirical literature indicates that the academy’s sizable left-liberal skew has had an adverse impact on scholarship.”

Roughly 80 percent of right-wing academics said in the report that they feel there is a hostile climate at work towards their beliefs which impacts hiring and firing decisions.

This is a big problem. We already know that researchers have a documented tendency to find evidence of phenomena that aligns with their personal views and to reject evidence either when it doesn’t or is unpopular with whomever is cutting the checks to support their research. In a survey of 2,000 research psychologists, over half openly admitted they selectively reported experiments to yield results favorable to their predisposed views. A growing number of scientists have noticed the wave of retractions, especially among social scientists, that has arisen from a rising wave of identity politics.

Another study found that up to 34 percent of researchers openly self-report engaging in “questionable research practices,” including “dropping data points on a gut feeling” and “changing the design, methodology, and results of a study in response to pressures from a funding source,” whereas up to 72 percent of those surveyed knew of colleagues who had done so. The National Science Foundation estimates that this sort of research misconduct creates over $110 million in annual costs.

What’s at the root of the rot? Well, it’s the same entity that pays for many grants at private and public institutions of higher learning: the government. The government also has a legal monopoly on student lending that controls the pocketbooks of such institutions.

Government funding of research produces enormous financial incentives for scientists to engage in dubious laboratory research. Academics are under financial pressure to rapidly and continually publish research to sustain their careers, often resulting in shoddy and misleading work. Even major scientific journals like Nature are asking, “Is Science Broken?”

“Much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue,” Richard Horton, editor of the peer-reviewed medical journal The Lancet, wrote in a study. “Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness.”

For basic public-choice reasons, bureaucrats at the NIH, NSF, and all the other alphabet-soup agencies only fund lines of inquiry that fit their political preconceptions. To quote Samuel Broder, the former director of the National Cancer Institute: “If it was up to the NIH to cure polio through a centrally directed program, you’d have the best iron lung in the world but not a polio vaccine.”

A healthy government would withdraw financial support from institutions that routinely failed rather than reasoning that the solution was to give them more money next time.