It's Even Happening at Science

It's pretty clear that big social media platforms are making a concerted effort to stifle conservative opinion. The recent news about Google's intent to influence the 2020 election is just the latest in a string of revelations of the deplatforming and demonetizing of conservative users.

David Klinghoffer at Evolution News has a short piece that shows how political bias is also corrupting at least one major scientific journal.

In 2008 the journal Science published research co-authored by John Hibbing and Douglas Oxley that purported to show that persons with strong political beliefs and less sensitivity to sudden noises and threatening visual images were more likely to support the liberal position on a number of issues whereas people who demonstrated more visceral reactions to those same factors were more likely to favor conservative positions.

The article became widely cited as demonstrating that conservatism is largely determined by properties in the brain associated with primitive fears and sundry other neanderthalish traits.

It fit the narrative, so to speak, of conservatives as brutish, non-rational yokels, but recently another group of researchers tried to duplicate the study's results and found that they could not.

Here's Klinghoffer:

Some other researchers decided to test the Science results — to confirm, not disconfirm, them. They tell their story in an article for Slate that is an eye-opener.

They used a larger field of subjects, 202 instead of just 46. Guess what? The results of the study by Hibbing and his colleagues were not reproducible.

And guess what again? Science preferred not to publish this finding. There was no implication that Oxley et al. had committed any errors. There was no “train wreck” in this case. It was just that, as often happens, their results did not repeat themselves, at all, when a more extensive study was attempted.

The most prestigious science journal perhaps in the world was perfectly willing to publish a paper that has been used to disparage about half or more of the country's population, but they were unwilling to publish a more thoroughly researched paper that would've helped correct the misimpression.

The rebuffed team wrote this at Slate:

Our first thought was that we were doing something wrong. So, we asked the original researchers for their images, which they generously provided to us, and we added a few more. We took the step of “pre-registering” a more direct replication of the Science study, meaning that we detailed exactly what we were going to do before we did it and made that public.

The direct replication took place in Philadelphia, where we recruited 202 participants (more than four times the original sample size of 46 used in the Science study). Again, we found no correlation between physiological reactions to threatening images (the original ones or the ones we added) and political conservatism — no matter how we looked at the data.

The authors of the more recent study describe their failure to persuade the editors at Science to consider their paper:

We drafted a paper that reported the failed replication studies along with a more nuanced discussion about the ways in which physiology might matter for politics and sent it to Science. We did not expect Science to immediately publish the paper, but because our findings cast doubt on an influential study published in its pages, we thought the editorial team would at least send it out for peer review.

It did not. About a week later, we received a summary rejection with the explanation that the Science advisory board of academics and editorial team felt that since the publication of this article the field has moved on and that, while they concluded that we had offered a conclusive replication of the original study, it would be better suited for a less visible subfield journal.

We wrote back asking them to consider at least sending our work out for review. (They could still reject it if the reviewers found fatal flaws in our replications.) We argued that the original article continues to be highly influential and is often featured in popular science pieces in the lay media (for instance, here, here, here, and here), where the research is translated into a claim that physiology allows one to predict liberals and conservatives with a high degree of accuracy.

We believe that Science has a responsibility to set the record straight in the same way that a newspaper does when it publishes something that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. We were rebuffed without a reason....

Our cultural credibility crisis must be very far advanced when one of the most trusted journals - in a field that has traditionally stood for the objective pursuit of the truth - seems to have adopted a policy of declining papers that transgress their own ideological predilections.