Higher Intolerance

“I may be wrong and you may be right, and by all effort we may get nearer to the truth.” – Sir Karl Popper

Last year my closest friend in the psychology department found angry strangers in her otherwise peaceful neighborhood not far from the university. It was a Sunday. They were protesting her use of animals in research. Of course I knew that other psychological scientists have had these kinds of problems, but my friend works with rats. And her work is the kind that makes important contributions to learning theory, but also to alleviating human suffering, like that of cancer patients.

My colleague’s story could have been told in a provocative new book called The New Know-Nothings by Morton Hunt (Transaction Publishers, 1999). It wasn’t told, perhaps because it was too mild compared to the generally more horrific cases that Hunt elaborates upon in this intriguing book, subtitled ”’The political foes of the scientific study of human nature.” Morton Hunt, by the way, began his career in 1948 as a staff writer for the McGraw-Hill magazine Science Illustrated, and is now a specialist in behavioral sciences and the author of many other books including The Story of Psychology.

The New Know-Nothings is about ideological suppression of scientific knowledge. Of course there is nothing new about that kind of activity. Just ask Galileo. The new style of suppressing scientific knowledge does not necessarily involve deprivation of one’s professorship, months of imprisonment and trial, and the prospect of being burned at the stake. But it can and has involved tremendous harassment and it has happened to numerous behavioral scientists and members of APS.

One psychologist who was studying behavioral changes in squirrel and macaque monkeys caused by the inhalation of crack was riding high on the joy of discoveries that might help in the understanding of human crack use. His work was well regarded if the grants, publications, and awards that be had received were any indication. Once allegations by an animal rights organization surfaced claiming that he had subjected research animals to barbaric tortures, he was effectively driven into a kind of hiding at another institution, spending much of his time distracted from scientific work worrying about pending lawsuits.

Psychologists who specialize in behavior genetics have taken their share of hits. One prominent member of APS has been labeled a racist by campus activists, faced spray painted slogans calling him a Nazi on campus walls, and fended off efforts to have him fired. A former president of our organization who tread on this dangerous ground, had her highly regarded research called slovenly, reactionary, and derogatory. Anticipating even worse, she contemplated emigration.

Psychologists who fought in the Gender Skirmishes, the Alcohol Clashes, the Sex Battles, and the LQ. Wars have suffered countless casualties. They have been met with hostility on the part of colleagues and lay citizens. They have faced vilification in journals and the media, dealt with orchestrated interference with their lectures, fended off efforts to relieve them from their academic jobs, and had to confront more than a dollop of hate mail and threats to their families. Hunt asks, would these scientists have pursued this line of work had they known the personal cost? The answers he receives reveal much about a kind of human nature I admire.

As Hunt put it, “the diffusion of antiresearch attitudes and behavior throughout the body politic should deeply disturb all those who believe that science. rather than religious, political, or philosophic doctrines, offers the best hope to understanding the world and human nature.”

What appears to be happening in most of these cases is that people are making decisions on incomplete knowledge. It’s politics as usual, only carried out in a scientific setting.

If we believe, as APS member Randy Gallistel put it so eloquently, that the pursuit of scientific understanding is among the noblest of all human goals; if we believe, as he put it, that like the pursuit of great art, like the preservation of a beautiful wilderness, it is good in and of itself, then we should join in our interest to protect the freedom of scientific expression.

Of course this needs to be done with an appreciation that there are some limits to be placed on acceptable methods, so as to safeguard the rights of research participants. Hopefully, though, we can model legitimate and constructive ways to challenge ideas that we might not like or agree with. In a democracy, this is done by conducting or communicating research findings that contradict or disprove opposing theories. It should not be done by halting research that offends our sensibilities, nor by subjecting the creator of offending theories to the guillotine.

The last line of The New Know-Nothings is a quote from a scientist in another field, J. Robert Oppenheimer, uttered 50 years ago: “The scientist is free, and must he free, to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors.” Paste that one on the filing cabinet next to your desk.