30.6: Objectivity and Investigation

One final epistemic issue worth reflecting on is the nature of investigation and our assumption of objectivity. Many criticisms have been offered, coming originally from feminist philosophy, but later philosophy of race and gender more broadly, arguing that bias plays a far greater role in the natural and social sciences the we would like to admit. The concern is that we often conflate the fact that the scientific method is objective with the idea that scientific investigation is objective. Observation and investigation do not happen in a vacuum. As we have discussed, in order to engage in scientific research, we need to have a hypothesis that we are testing. The hypotheses come from people making decisions about what is a reasonable claim, and what is worth investigating. These same people decide how to frame research questions, what data should be collected, how that collection should happen, and what conclusions should be drawn from the data. At all of these stages we are susceptible to bias, and even when we are trying to be impartial, we are influenced by our existing schemas.

The consequences of this are not slight. What we can know is determined by what we study. As you may have observed from the social dimension section of this text, we have spent a good deal of time studying conformity and obedience, certainly more than we have cooperation (and much of that cooperation research is focused on explaining defection rather than on how best to facilitate working together). Might this be different if a more diverse group was involved in psychological research from the start? 90% of women suffer moderate to severe pain and discomfort from premenstrual syndrome, while only 19% of men experience erectile dysfunction. Yet erectile dysfunction studies outnumber PMS research 5 to 1. Can you think of an explanation for this other than a lack of objectivity?