I inhabit two different sometimes incompatible worlds as an academic scientist and a progressive activist.
In science, logic and the search for alternative explanations transcend opinion and group expectations. When testing a vaccine, you begin by assuming it doesn’t work, the null hypothesis in clinical trials lingo. You then challenge that assumption with an experiment that tests whether the evidence justifies claiming effectiveness.
Without supporting data, a priori opinions have no business contributing to that judgment. Assessments of truth are uninformed unless they balance the impact of contradictory evidence. Although expectations are not always met, the scientific culture is inexorable: The data has the last word.
My activist persona sees fundamental societal change as frequently a bottom-up phenomenon. Whether it was civil rights, union rights or women’s suffrage, ordinary people were the heroes. Washington’s validation came later.
People are also reading…
There were no egghead activists testing hypotheses about how best to integrate lunch counters. If that were the approach, Jim Crow might still be flourishing. Activists must strategize and seek truth with skeptical scientific eyes. But they won’t rally the troops with an academic balancing of evidence. They must behave like activists.
But strategizing without nuance can be counterproductive. Strong commitments to a cause can yield the antithesis of critical scientific thinking: an aversion to the complexity of competing views, a search for cherry-picked supporting evidence only, a coterie of required opinions that beget tacit self-censorship and illusions of unanimity.
Evolutionary biologists posit that groupthink of this sort may be a natural human condition, nurtured in a prehistoric time when being ostracized by your compatriots could yield lethal exposure to hunger or saber-toothed tigers. We are thereby conditioned by ancient ancestors to embrace prevailing group viewpoints, not to parse evidence in search of objective truth.
The upshot is that a distorted relationship with science does not require embracing
fantasylands like climate change denial. It can manifest itself more subtly in the all-too-human reality that scientific thinking is not the natural order of our species. We have to work at it.
To use an analogy that is both frivolous and harsh, the organic human tendency to lend credence to only one side of an issue, our side, is reminiscent of an old comedy routine where a sportscaster gives the baseball scores by reporting the run total of only one team in each game. It’s presumably accurate, utterly uninformative and typical.
It’s typical of peace activists who justifiably support Palestinian rights but who commonly present the runs scored by one team when they rationalize Palestinian transgressions or blame them reflexively on Israel.
It’s endemic among environmentalists who, in one frequently unexamined breath, highlight the apocalyptic dangers of climate change and opposition to nuclear power, still the world’s leading carbon-free energy source. The cognitive dissonance is rarely noticed. And when nuclear downsides are articulated, there is commonly only one acceptable viewpoint. So the debate is seldom joined.
It’s widespread among avatars of every political persuasion who, by virtue of their passion, tend to reorder the logical path to truth. They do so by beginning at what should be the end, with conclusions that affirm preexisting beliefs, while eschewing the logical first step of evaluating competing possibilities.
The above examples are unrelated to your view of Palestinian rights or nuclear power. But they are very much about science. Not the eye-popping technologies and unfathomable discoveries. Instead, they are about how we process information we might prefer were not true, whether we allow scientific thinking to enhance understanding, whether we acknowledge competing realities as we seek truth in our daily lives.
In my leftwing-activist household growing up, the debates were endless, and the greatest crime for us kids was not having an opinion. The greatest certainty, whatever that opinion, was that someone would shoot it down.
These freewheeling family conflagrations were far removed from data-driven science. But they serendipitously imprinted the seminal scientific lesson that, in any discipline, understanding and discovery require unconstrained exploration, with no reasonable option a priori off the table, with tempered reverence for group expectations.
Activists should embrace the virtues of civil arguments that partly shoot them down. Recognize the dangers of confirmation bias through one-sided exposures. Accept the nobility of being wrong and changing one’s mind. They must abandon that role of half-the-facts sportscaster and pursue raucous exploration of what is and isn’t true, what can and can’t be effective. They must strategize and seek truth like scientists, in short, while behaving and advocating like activists.
Ken Schechtman, PhD, is a professor of biostatistics and medicine at the Washington University School of Medicine, a life-long political activist on the left, and a freelance writer when time permits.