Saturday, July 18, 2009

What We Don't Know Due to Community Decision Making in Scientific Paradigms

Thomas Bouchard says in an interview in Science magazine:
But we still have whole domains we can't talk about. One of the great dangers in the psychology of individual differences is self-censorship. For example, when I was a student, it was widely accepted that black self-esteem was much lower than white self-esteem, and that was a cause of differences in achievement between the twogroups. Now that's been completely overturned—there is virtually no racial difference in self-esteem. But people had enormous amounts of data [showing this] that they didn't publish because it did not fit the prevailing belief system. How much wasted effort was generated by the flawed self-esteem work as an explanation of the black-white IQ difference? Now a days, I'm sure there are people who are not publishing stuff on sex differences.
Comment: I suspect that he is right in that we fail to have access to important scientific knowledge that its holders fail to publish because it does not fit the prevailing belief system (or that reviewers fail to recommend and journals fail to publish for the same reason). JAD

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