11.2 When Is Science Suspect

Learning Goals

[Link to PlayPosit]

[Link to instructional video]

More details

After this lesson, students should

1. Recognize the potential to abuse science for social and political ends.
2. Show heightened caution in situations in which science involves the study of human groups and subsequent validation of societal power structures.
3. Recognize that you are yourself always implicated in some social dynamic or other that may be relevant to the assessment of any particular study of human groups.

Definitions

• Just World Fallacy

  The tendency to believe that outcomes are deserved and existing social structures are justified.

Examples

• The classic example of IQ tests brought up by John Campbell illustrates that even with the best intentions, such tests are designed to inadvertently discriminate based on certain cultural factors unrelated to "intelligence", if such a concept is even meaningful in a realist sense. See also the discussion on realism, etc., in 1.2 Shared Reality.
• Standardised testing such as the SAT and the GRE for the purpose of university admissions suffer from similar discriminatory outcomes as IQ tests.
• Historically, psychological or medical studies are often performed on predominantly white, wealthy, young males, with conclusions that are nevertheless generalised to the culturally and genetically diverse global population. While the studies themselves may not be discriminatory explicitly or implicitly, the differing validity of their application to diverse populations may be a source of furthered inequality.

Common Misconceptions

• Only a racist scientist could produce a racially discriminatory study.

  As an example, a perfectly well-intentioned scientist studying the level of altruism in people across ethnic groups may come up with an operationalist definition of altruism that is based on their own cultural understanding of the term and fails to include alternative expressions of altruism in other cultures.

Context

After discussing how science may go wrong in its form in 9.1 Pathological Science, we now discuss how science may go wrong in its societal outcome. Through a discussion activity, students will appreciate the difficulty in measuring humans in a way that is absolutely free of confounds that have discriminatory implications, and thus learn the importance of social responsibility as a scientist.

Before

1.1 Introduction and When Is Science Relevant

If science is to be used in societal decision making, scientists must be mindful of its potential to cause harm.

1.2 Shared Reality

When studying humans, it is often necessary to define terms operationally, such as "what behaviours constitute altruism". Such definitions may be a crude measure of a more realist human trait, if one even exists. Cultural and personal biases may easily cause such definitions to favour the researchers' own group at the expense of others.

After

10.1 Confirmation Bias

It is tempting, though improper, for scientists to only publish results in a way that confirms the predominant belief. When it comes to human groups, this belief may be a mere stereotype.

Recommended Outline

Before Class

• [Any essential logistical things that need to be done for this class]
• Prepare a seating chart.
• Review PlayPosit and discussion questions and ask faculty, Gabriel, or Emlen any questions you have.
• (Optional) Prepare a presentation.

During Class

• (5 min) Come up with some fun way to assign the roles of spokesperson and notetaker (e.g. earliest birthday in the year, lives furthest from campus). Remind them of the responsibilities of these roles.
• ([#] min) [Description of some module from #Lesson Content]
• (5 min) Collect questions for plenary.

After Class

• [Any essential logistical things that need to be done as followup for this class]
• Collect answers from notetakers for the forum / plenary.

Lesson Content

Admissions Officer

We want to demonstrate how difficult it is to come up with criteria with which to measure humans without inadvertently disadvantaging certain groups of people. Nevertheless, these imperfect criteria are often better than randomly choosing people without any criteria. Having some form of criteria is often necessary. In this activity the students are split into small groups and have to act as admissions officers for various groups and teams. The tests are meant to capture the most important aspects of one's aptitude in a certain task, but due to limited time and resources, these tests are inevitably highly flawed.

Instructions

1. Use the existing 6 groups of 5.
2. Give each group a different prompt: as an admissions officer, you need to select 20 out of 100 kids. You only have one afternoon of "tryouts" or "test", for 3 min per applicant. You can give them any test/task you want, but at the end of the day, the choices must depend only on the result of this test. You can have many test items/questions, but each one needs to result in a numerical value, rather than a mere personal judgment (e.g. how beautiful one's voice is).
3. Do you best to select people who have the highest aptitude in the given prompt. Clearly write down the task and criteria for judging.
4. Spend (x min) writing these criteria down.
5. Spend (x min) presenting the criteria to a paired group and listening to the paired group's criteria.
6. Spend (x min) brainstorming why the other group's specific criteria may inadvertently exclude kids that still really good "players" if judged holistically but would not score well on those specific criteria.

Prompts:

1. American football team
2. Chess (note a full game typically takes 10 min)
3. Children's choir
4. Honours mathematics programme
5. Programming camp
6. Rock climbing
7. Rowing
8. E-sports league (e.g. Smash bros)
9. Model UN
10. History camp
11. Poetry group

Discussion Questions

1. What are the difficulties that you faced when coming up with selection criteria?
2. Why might an otherwise highly qualified kid be rejected?
3. How would you improve your criteria or the selection process itself to be more inclusive?

Collect Questions for Plenary

(5 min) Collect remaining questions from the students for faculty in plenary (can be questions for clarification, extension, discussion, etc.), and add [ here].