more than twenty microaggressions against people of color. Among them: hanging pictures of white U.S. presidents on your wall (it sends the signal that only white men can succeed). The paper was an instant smash, thanks to confirmation bias. It fit the leftish narrative shared by social scientists – that bourgeois Americans were in thrall to destructive and harmful stereotypes that could only be rectified by aggressive reprogramming. Soon researchers were discovering microaggressions against the poor, the disabled, women, and members of the LGBTQ+ community. The research, such as it was, entered the cultural and political bloodstream unchecked. At last, in 2017, a well-known psychologist named Scott Lilienfeld surveyed the scientific literature of microaggressions for Perspectives on Psychological Science . Astonishingly, Lilienfeld found, no researcher had even taken the trouble to try to replicate the original Columbia study, though thousands of subsequent papers had relied on it as sound science. (Over the past decade, the Columbia study has been cited in social-science papers an average of three times a week.) Entire experiments, Lilienfeld wrote, often consisted of nothing more than focus groups of ten or twelve subjects. Researchers encouraged them to describe the everyday encounters and inadvertent comments they found racially insensitive. And the researchers wouldn’t take no for an answer. Members of the focus groups were seldom identified by any meaningful criterion, and their reactions were tossed together and published as further proof of the microaggression epidemic.
So the literature piled up until the stack of studies was described, by journalists and researchers alike, as “overwhelming evidence” for the reality of microaggressions. “Scientists have discovered...” “Studies show...” “Research reveals...” Et voila . Social Science! FAILING FAILSAFE All experimental sciences rely on the failsafe of peer review before publication. It’s expected that shoddy research papers will be caught by a panel of two or three academics hired to double check the soundness of the work before it’s published. Yet in recent years, the weaknesses of the system have become undeniable. Most of us probably think “peer review” means that a third party has replicated the research and confirmed its finding. But, as we’ve seen, replication is almost never attempted in social science, certainly not at the level of peer review. Reviewers are busy careerists who give the paper a cursory review for obvious errors, at best. Being anonymous, they will pay no price if they get it wrong. Three years ago, the former editor of the British Medical Journal told the Royal Academy in London about an experiment of his own. A paper containing eight deliberate errors was sent to 300 researchers for peer review. No reviewer found more than five of the errors, most of them found two, and one in five of them found none. “If peer review was a drug it would never get on the market,” he said, “because we have lots of evidence of its adverse effects and don’t have evidence of its benefit.”
78 May 2018
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