A perspective on scientific censorship will be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences during the week of November 20, 2023 (it will appear at this link to the current issue of the PNAS). The preprint of the manuscript can be found here.
This paper was co-authored by dozens of prestigious scholars in the academic freedom space: Cory Clark, Lee Jussim, Komi Frey, Sean Stevens, Musa al-Gharbi, Karl Aquino, Michael Bailey, Nicole Barbaro, Roy Baumeister, April Bleske-Rechek, David Buss, Steve Ceci, Marco Del Giudice, Pete Ditto, Joe Forgas, David Geary, Glenn Geher, Sarah Haider, Nathan Honeycutt, Hrishikesh Joshi, Anna Krylov, Elizabeth Loftus, Glenn Loury, Louise Lu, Michael Macy, Chris Martin, John McWhorter, Geoffrey Miller, Pamela Paresky, Steven Pinker, Wilfred Reilly, Catherine Salmon, Steve Stewart-Williams, Philip Tetlock, Wendy Williams, Anne Wilson, Bo Winegard, George Yancey, and William von Hippel.
Recently, science journals and organizations have begun implementing censorship policies that they justify on grounds of preventing ostensible harms. Whereas former analyses have emphasized that scientific censorship is driven by powerful (usually government) officials with dark motives such as dogmatism, authoritarianism, and intolerance, this new paper demonstrates that scientists themselves often initiate scientific censorship and for seemingly prosocial reasons—beliefs about what is best for scientists and society. Scientists censor themselves and each other to protect themselves and their peers from public scrutiny and to protect vulnerable groups from scientific findings they fear might cause harm. As this paper reveals, such harm concerns typically involve untested assumptions that are presumed true without evidence.
These new insights suggest that minimizing scientific censorship requires persuading scientists of the low societal costs of publishing even controversial work and the high societal costs of censorship. The paper concludes by advocating for more transparency and accountability in scientific decision-making by journals and professional societies. These changes would facilitate empirical tests of the true costs and benefits of censoring controversial research.
Anna Krylov, a STEM professor, warns that "By hiding selected facts, censorship distorts our understanding of the world and therefore undermines our ability to solve challenging problems. Censorship also gives the public reasons to distrust science." Distinguished Professor Lee Jussim adds, “University administrators are now well-versed in supposed threats to social justice; far fewer know much about or have deep commitments to academic freedom. Consequently, the immediate and downstream costs of censorship are rarely considered or weighed against the supposed benefits of not causing offense. No wonder we have seen a rising tide of scientific censorship.”
The lead author, Cory Clark, hopes that the paper “will raise the standards of our science leaders and decision-makers who aim to obstruct science based on their personal moral intuitions. At minimum, they should be held to the same standards as the rest of us who strive to create and disseminate science, and make their case with data.”
Co-authors Al-Gharbi and Clark have also written a related Op-Ed, which will be published in The Chronicle shortly after the paper.