Abstract
We make the case that Bird, Jackson Jr., and Winston's (BJ&W; 2024) policy proposals boil down to a rejection of Merton's (1942) traditional scientific norms of communality, universalism, disinterestedness, and organized scepticism, and a demand for anti-Mertonian norms to be imposed, top down, upon psychological science. Their anti-Mertonian norms (specifically secrecy, particularism, interestedness, and organized dogmatism) are betrayals of the scientific ethos. We highlight several problems with their use of a recent, tragic mass shooting as an alleged instance of harm arising from the (mis)use of Racial Hereditarian Research (RHR). We then discuss adverse effects that their imposition of anti-Mertonian, anti-scientific norms would likely cause in relation to: 1) instances of research on racial and ethnic differences that have produced findings agreeable to egalitarianism, and which would be proscribed under their framework; 2) the fomenting of genuinely scientifically racist beliefs that are empirically at odds with RHR; and 3) the chilling effect on other areas of science whose findings have also been abused by perpetrators of violent crime, including “mainstream genetics”. Ultimately, we observe that BJ&W's anti-Mertonian policy prescriptions are unworkable in practice, authoritarian in spirit, and would be highly damaging to psychological science if widely enforced.
Published Version
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