Author Archives: jstemwedel

Crime, punishment, and the way forward: in the wake of Sheri Sangji’s death, what should happen to Patrick Harran?

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When bad things happen in an academic laboratory, what should happen to people who bear responsibility for those bad things — even if they didn’t mean for them to happen?

This is the broad question I’ve been thinking about in connection with the prosecution of chemistry professor Patrick Harran and UCLA in connection with the laboratory accident that killed Sheri Sangji. Potentially, Harran could face jail time, and there has been a good bit of discussion (as in these posts at Chemjobber) about whether that’s what he deserves.

I’ll be honest: I find myself uncomfortable weighing Harran’s actions (and inaction) as worthy of jail time or not, let alone assigning the appropriate number of months or years behind bars to punish him for Sheri Sangji’s death. And, other than satisfying our appetite for retribution, I am utterly unsure whether such a penalty in this case would help. I don’t know that it would do much to change the conditions and institutions that ought to be changed in the wake of this accident. (On the matter of changing institutions, read the excellent posts at ChemBark and Chemjobber.)

Sheri Sangji’s death should alert us that things need to change. Conditions in academic labs need to change. Attitudes and behaviors of PIs, students, and technicians need to change. University departments (which are both builders of knowledge and trainers of new scientists) need to change. What kind of resolution of the prosecution of Prof. Harran could bring about the needed changes?

The best way forward should keep lab accidents like the one that killed Sheri Sangji from happening again. Of course, if we’re talking about avoiding such lab accidents, we’re assuming this one was preventable through some combination of proper safety equipment and attire, training, supervision, and the like.

Jailing the PI would certainly get the attention of other PIs and would underline the message that they are responsible for safety in their labs, as well as for addressing deficiencies identified in safety inspections (and maybe even for identifying and addressing the deficiencies themselves). Maybe jailing the PI in this case would also make Sheri Sangji’s family feel that justice had been served.

But, jailing the PI here might also move him, and the larger problem of making research activities reliably non-lethal, out of the sight of the people who really need to be focused on learning the lesson here.

Maybe jail would make him appear like more of the monster; his lab must have been much worse than ours. Or maybe his absence from the academic research milieu might simply mean the other PIs would return their focus to the pressing problems of securing funding, generating data, and cranking out manuscripts. Perhaps their institutions would be stricter about future safety inspections, but the PIs would do what they needed to do to return to the business as usual. Given the extent to which universities rely on external grants secured by such scientific business-as-usual, it’s hard to imagine universities doing much to shake PIs out of this routine.

If we’re interested in justice that actually addresses the dangers of business as usual, I think there is another option we should explore.

I don’t think Prof. Harran should be allowed to continue with the lines of research he was pursuing when the accident in his lab claimed Sheri Sangji’s life. The way he conducted that research — the way he supervised activities and personnel — killed someone employed to advance the research. That’s a big enough strike to bench him and let other PIs play that knowledge-building zone.

Instead, Harran should devote the remainder of his career to creating a scientific culture — at UCLA and beyond — in which the safety of the people performing the experiments (and making the reagents, and fixing the equipment, and cleaning the glassware) is never sacrificed to the goal of getting more and faster results. His mission should be to communicate just how easy it was for a “good PI” to allow lapses in safe procedures, to assume students and staff will figure out how to be safe when using materials or techniques that are new to them, to find tasks more important than supervising lab work, to discourage questions about how to be safe.

This shouldn’t be a new service requirement on Harran in addition to his research and his teaching. This should be the core of his job.

He should not only grapple with the soul-searching a decent person does when he’s allowed conditions that have killed and underling, but also do that soul-searching in a space where the rest of the scientific community can participate and include themselves in the examination. Harran’s presence in this role — his active involvement with his department in this role — means that Sheri Sangji and the circumstances that killed her will not be forgotten.

Since research grants would be unlikely to pay for this new set of professorial professional responsibilities — and since UCLA likely bears some share of responsibility for creating the conditions that killed Sheri Sangji — UCLA should fully fund these new responsibilities of Harran’s position moving forward. As well, UCLA should provide what support is necessary to allow Harran’s colleagues (and students and other personnel in their labs) to adapt their own practices in ways that incorporate his lessons. And, it might have a meaningful impact if professional organizations like the American Chemical Society provided funds for Harran to travel and speak to others running academic labs about how to make them safer.

In short, my hunch is that the best way to achieve progress on safe conditions and practices (not to mention relationships in lab groups that help everyone promote safety) is not to separate Harran from his professional community but to return him to that community with a new mission. His new charge would be to help build a better business-as-usual.

It might not be the science career he envisioned, but I reckon it’s a job that needs doing. Harran now has ample first-hand knowledge of why it matters.

Health care provider and patient/client: situations in which fulfilling your ethical duties might not be a no-brainer.

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Thanks in no small part to the invitation of the fantastic Doctor Zen, I was honored this past week to be a participant in the PACE 3rd Annual Biomedical Ethics Conference. The conference brought together an eclectic mix of people who care about bioethics: nurses, counselors, physicians, physicians’ assistants, lawyers, philosophers, scientists, students, professors, and people practicing their professions out “in the world”.*

As good conferences do, this one left me with a head full of issues with which I’m still grappling. So, as bloggers sometimes do, I’m going to put one of those issues out there and invite you to grapple with it, too.

A question that kept coming up was what exactly it means for a health care provider (broadly construed) to fulfill hir duties to hir patient/client.

Of course, the folks in the ballroom could rattle off the standard ethical principles that should guide their decision-making — respect for persons (which includes respect for the autonomy of the patient-client), beneficence, non-maleficence, justice — but sometimes these principles seem to pull in different directions, which means just what one should do when the rubber hits the road is not always obvious.

For example:

1. In some states, health care professionals are “mandatory reporters” of domestic violence — that is, if they encounter a patient who they have reason to believe is a victim of domestic violence, they are obligated by law to report it to the authorities. However, it is sometimes the case that getting the case into the legal system triggers retaliatory violence against the victim by the abuser. Moreover, in the aftermath of reporting, the victim may be less willing (or able) to seek further medical care. Is the best way to do one’s duty to one’s patient always to report? Or are their instances where one better fulfills those duties by not reporting (and if so, what are the foreseeable costs of such a course of action — to that patient, to the health care provider, to other patients, to the larger community)?

2. A patient with a terminal illness may feel that the best way for hir physician to respect hir autonomy would be to assist hir in ending hir life. However, physician-assisted suicide is usually interpreted as clearly counter to the requirements of non-maleficence (“do no harm”) and beneficence. In most of the U.S., it’s also illegal. Can a physician refuse to provide the patient in this situation with the sought-after assistance without being paternalistic?** Is it fair game for the physician’s discussion with the patient here to touch on personal values that it might not be fair for the patient to ask the physician to compromise? Are there foreseeable consequences of what, to the patient, looks like a personal choice that might impact the physician’s relationship with other patients, with hir professional community, or with the larger community?

3. In Texas, the law currently requires that patients seeking abortions must submit to transvaginal ultrasounds first. In other words, the law requires health care provider to subject patient to a medically unnecessary invasive procedure. The alternative is for the patient to carry to term an unwanted pregnancy. Both choices, arguably, subject the patient to violence.

Does the health care provider who is trying to uphold hir obligations to hir patient have an obligation to break the law? If it’s a bad law — here, one whose requirements make it impossible for a health care provider to fulfill hir duties to patients — ought health care providers to put their own skin in the game to change it?

Here’s what I’ve written before about how ethically to challenge bad rules:

If you’re part of a professional community, you’re supposed to abide by the rules set by the commissions and institutions governing your professional community.

If you don’t think they’re good rules, of course, one of the things you should do as a member of that professional community is make a case for changing them. However, in the meantime making yourself an exception to the rules that govern the other members of your professional community is pretty much the textbook definition of an ethical violation.

The gist here is that sneakily violating a bad rule (perhaps even while paying lip service to following it) rather that standing up and explicitly arguing against the bad rule — not just when it’s applied to you but when it’s applied to anyone else in your professional community — is wrong. It does nothing to overturn the bad rule, it involves you in deception, and it prioritizes your interests over everyone else’s.

The particular situation here is tricky, though, given that as I understand it the Texas law is a rule imposed on medical professionals by lawmakers, not a rule that the community of medical professionals created and implemented themselves the better to help them fulfill their duties to their patients. Indeed, it seems pretty clear that the lawmakers were willing to sacrifice duties that are absolutely central in the physician-patient relationship when they imposed this law.

Moreover, I think the way forward is complicated by concerns about how to ensure that patients get care that is helpful, not harmful, to them. If Texas physicians who opposed the mandatory transvaginal ultrasound requirement were to fill the jails to protest the law, who does that leave to deliver ethical care to people on the outside seeking abortions? Is this a place where the professional community as a whole ought to be pushing back against the law rather than leaving it to individual members of that community to push back?

* * * * *

If these examples have common threads, one of them is that what the law requires (or what the law allows) seems not to line up neatly with what our ethics require. Perhaps this speaks to the difficulty of getting laws to capture the tricky balancing act that acting ethically towards one’s patients/clients requires of health care professionals. Or, maybe it speaks to law makers not always being focused on creating an environment in which health care providers can deliver on their ethical duties to their patients/clients (perhaps even disagreeing with professional communities about just what those ethical duties are).

What does this mismatch mean for what patients/clients can legitimately expect from their health care providers? Or for what health care providers can realistically deliver to their patients/clients?

And, if you were a health care provider in one of these situations, what would you do?
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*Arguably, however, universities and their denizens are also in the world. We share the same fabric of space-time as the rest of y’all.

**Note that paternalism is likely warranted in a number of circumstances. However, when we’re talking about a patient of sound mind, maybe paternalism shouldn’t be the physician’s go-to stance.

Getting kids interested in math careers may require a hero.

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Back when I was a high school math geek, our math team would go to meets that occasionally had tables set up to encourage us to pursue various careers that would make use of our mad math skillz. The one such profession where the level of encouragement far outstripped our teenaged interest was the actuarial field. Indeed, more than the objective boringness of the field (to the extent that we had enough information to evaluate that) it may have been the vehement protests of how not-boring actuarial work and actuaries are (really!) that persuaded us that actuarial work was probably pretty boring.

Recently, I think I have hit upon something that might help actuaries turn this perception around. They need a superhero.

Seriously, if any comic book superhero of note had been an actuary as his cover job, actuarial work would have gotten an automatic boost in the estimation of teen geeks. Journalism? Cool, because that was Superman’s day job. Millionaire-industrialist-playboy-philanthropist? Definitely an acceptable career path, since that was Batman’s day job. Librarian? Cool not just because of the access to all those books and periodicals, but also because it was Batgirl’s day job. High school student? Not cool, exactly, but more tolerable on account of being Spiderman’s day job.

Having a superhero who alternated nights of crime-fighting with days assessing risk would raise the esteem of actuarial science among high school mathletes.

There are details that would need to be worked out, of course.

The name for this superhero? Let’s pencil in The Numerator. (“He always comes out on top!”)

His origin story? Probably it would involve looking up from his calculations and crying, “Egad! Crime does pay!” After which, of course, he would dedicate himself to fighting that crime (else we’re looking at the origin story of a supervillain).*

My guess is that The Numerator is going to be one of those superheros that relies on cool gadgets and knowledge rather than on actual superhuman strength or powers — more like Batman than Spiderman. (Otherwise, we’re looking at him getting his fingers caught in a radioactive adding machine, thereby ending up with the power to shoot calculator tape from his fingers, which … I don’t think so.) His utility belt probably includes actuarial tables and a slide-rule. But maybe he’s also a synesthete who can look at the numbers and smell evil.

His nemeses? Undoubtedly they will be legion — corporate crooks, purveyors of Ponzi schemes — but one of them might be Pay-Day Shark. This supervillain, tricked out in a sharkskin suit, will be happy to give you an advance on your paycheck as long as you’re ready to pay interest and fees that end up being about 400% of the amount you’re borrowing. When you can’t pay, he’ll threaten you will his tank of hungry and ill-tempered (but not laser-sight-equipped) sharks. He may even let his pretties eat one of your limbs. But Pay-Day Shark wants to help you — he’ll loan you a prosthetic limb, for a reasonable fee.

Who can save you from his clutches? The Numerator!

DC Comics? Marvel Comics? American Academy of Actuaries? I think we have something here. Let’s talk.

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*It possible that linking actuarial science with supervillainy might also make young geeks hold it in higher esteem. Maybe someone should perform a risk-benefit analysis of this … but who?

Everyday mentors: a tribute to Dr. James E. Lu Valle.

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People talk a lot about the importance of mentors, and scientific trainees are regularly encouraged to find strong mentors to help them find their way as they work to become grown-up scientists. Sometimes, though, mentoring doesn’t happen in explicit coaching sessions but in casual conversations. And sometimes, when you’re not looking for them, mentors find you.

Back in the spring and autumn of 1992, I was a chemistry graduate student starting to believe that I might actually get enough of my experiments to work to get my Ph.D. As such, I did what senior graduate students in my department were supposed to do: I began preparing myself to interview with employers who came to my campus (an assortment of industry companies and national labs), and I made regular visits to my department’s large job announcement binder (familiarly referred to as “The Book of Job”).

What optimism successes in the lab giveth, the daunting terrain laid out in “The Book of Job” taketh away.

It wasn’t just the announcements of postdoctoral positions (positions, I had been told, which provided the standard path by which to develop research experience in an area distinct from the one that was the focus of the doctoral research) that listed as prerequisites three or more years of research experience in that very area. The very exercise of trying to imagine myself meeting the needs of an academic department looking for a certain kind of researcher was … really hard. It sounded like they were all looking for researchers significantly more powerful than I felt myself to be at that point, and I wasn’t sure if it was realistic to expect that I could develop those powers.

I was having a crisis of faith, but I was trying to keep it under wraps because I was pretty sure that having that crisis was a sign that my skills and potential as a chemist were lacking.

It was during my regularly scheduled freak-out over the binder in the department lobby that I really got to know Dr. Lu Valle. While I was in the department, his official position was as a “visiting scholar”, but since he had been the director of undergraduate labs in the department for years before he retired, he wasn’t really visiting, he was at home. And Dr. Lu Valle took it upon himself to make me feel at home, too — not just in the department, but in chemistry.

It started with light conversation. Dr. Lu Valle would ask what new listings had turned up in the binder since the last time he had seen me. Then he’d ask about what kind of listings I was hoping would turn up there. Soon, we were talking about what kind of things I hoped for in a chemical career, and about what scared me in my imagination of a chemical career.

That he bothered to draw me out and let me talk about my fears made those fears a lot more manageable.

But Dr. Lu Valle went even further than just getting me to voice my fears. He reassured me that it was normal for good chemists to have these fears, and that everyone had to get across the chasm between knowing you could be a good student and believing you could be a successful grown-up scientist. And he took it as an absolute given that I could get across this chasm.

Now, I should note for the record that my advisor did much to encourage me (along with pressing me to think harder, to make sure my data was as good as it could be, to anticipate flaws in my interpretations, and so forth). But the advisor-advisee relationship can be fraught. When you’ve been busting your hump in the lab, showing weakness of any sort in your interactions with your PI can feel, viscerally, like a bad idea. I think that for a good stretch of time in my graduate lab, I put a spin on many of my interactions with my PI that was significantly more optimistic than I felt inside. (Then, I worked like mad so that my optimistic projections of what I would be able to accomplish had a reasonable chance of coming true.)

Being able to voice some of my worries to a senior chemist who didn’t need me to make headway on one of his research projects — and for whom reassuring me wasn’t part of the official job description — really helped. Dr. Lu Valle didn’t need to mentor me. He didn’t need to interact with me at all. But he did.

Somewhere in the course of our discussions, as we were talking about the frustrations of getting experiments to work, Dr. Lu Valle mentioned that his advisor had made him completely disassemble, then completely reassemble, complex apparatus — not just to get an experiment under control, but to persuade him that taking the whole thing apart and putting it all back together (even repeatedly) was within his powers.

That was the conversation in which that I learned that Dr. Lu Valle’s advisor had been Linus Pauling.

Now, maybe it amped up the pep-talks a little that a senior scientist who seemed to have complete faith that I was going to do fine had been trained by a guy who won two Nobel Prizes. But mostly, I think it reassured me that Dr. Lu Valle remembered what it was like to be a graduate student and to have to get over the chasm of not knowing if you can do it to believing that you can.

After the season of job interviews passed, I drifted away from “The Book of Job” and back to my lab to get some more experiments done and to get writing. Then, in January of 1993, while he was on vacation in New Zealand, Dr. Lu Valle died.

It was at his memorial service (which happened to be on my twenty-fifth birthday) that I learned the remarkable details of Dr. Lu Valle’s life that didn’t come up in our conversations in the department lobby. A press release from the Stanford University News Office describes some of the high points:

James E. Lu Valle, a visiting scholar at Stanford and retired director of undergraduate laboratories in the Chemistry Department, died Jan. 30 in Te Anau, New Zealand, while on vacation. He was 80.

During a long and varied career, Lu Valle’s research covered electron diffraction, photochemistry, magnetic susceptibility, reaction kinetics and mechanisms, photographic theory, magnetic resonance, solid-state physics, neurochemistry and the chemistry of memory and learning.

Lu Valle was well known in track circles as the 400- meter bronze medal winner of the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. …

Lu Valle ran in the Olympics the same year he graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from the University of California-Los Angeles. He then returned for his master’s degree in chemistry and physics, during which time he helped found the graduate student association and served as its first president. In 1983, UCLA named its new Graduate Student Union in his honor.

Lu Valle’s career in chemistry started at age 8, when he found a chemistry set under the Christmas tree. He tried every experiment possible, and eventually filled the house with smoke. At his mother’s insistence, the rest of his childhood experiments took place on the porch.

In 1940, Lu Valle earned a doctorate in chemistry and math under the tutelage of Linus Pauling at the California Institute of Technology. He then taught at Fisk University in Tennessee, after which he spent 10 years at Eastman Kodak working on color photography.

He was the first African American to be employed in the Eastman Kodak laboratories. While there, Lu Valle went on loan to the National Defense Research Committee to conduct research at the University of Chicago and the California Institute of Technology on devices for monitoring carbon dioxide in planes.

He later served as director of research at Fairchild Camera and Instrument and became director of physical and chemical research at Smith-Corona Merchant Labs in Palo Alto in 1969.

During that time, he made extensive use of the Chemistry Department library, in the process getting to know faculty members. When SCM closed its Palo Alto operations, the Chemistry Department asked him to head the freshman labs.

“He was eminently qualified, a first-class chemist,” Professor Douglas Skoog recounted in 1984, “and we were glad to have him. In fact, he was overqualified for the job.”

As head of the labs for seven years, his task was to assign teaching assistants and make sure that the right equipment was always ready.

In practice, he became a friend and counselor to the chemistry majors and pre-med students passing through the department. In an average year, 900 students would start freshman chemistry.

Lu Valle is survived by his wife of 47 years, Jean Lu Valle, of Palo Alto, and three children. Son John Vernon Lu Valle is an engineer with Allied Signal under contract to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, and Michael James Lu Valle is associated with Bell Laboratories in New Jersey. Daughter Phyllis Ann Lu Valle- Burke is a molecular biologist at Harvard Medical School. A sister, Mayme McWhorter of Los Angeles, also survives.

Dr. LuValle never talked to me about what it was like to be an African American athlete competing in Hitler’s Olympics. He didn’t share with me his experience of being the first African American scientist working at Eastman Kodak labs. We didn’t discuss the details of the research that he did across so many different scientific areas.

If I had known these facets of his past while he was alive, I would have liked to ask him about them.

But Dr. Lu Valle was, I think, more concerned with what I needed as someone trying to imagine myself taking on the role of a grown-up chemist. His success as the director of undergraduate labs had a lot to do with his ability and willingness to tune into what students needed, and then to provide it. With all of those accomplishments under his belt — accomplishments which potentially might have made a student like me think, “Well of course an exceptional person with so much talent and drive succeeded at science, but I’m not that exceptional!” — he wasn’t afraid to dig back to his experience of what it was like to be a graduate student, to remember the uncertainty, frustration, and fear that are a part of that experience, and to say, “I got through it, and I have every reason to believe that you will, too.”

I don’t know whether personal experience is what developed Dr. Lu Valle’s awareness of how important this kind of mentoring can be, but it wouldn’t surprise me a bit. As an African American graduate student at Caltech in the 1930s, I’m sure he had lots of people expecting him to fail. Having people in his life who expected that of course he would succeed — whether his parents, his advisor, or someone else with standing as a grown-up scientist — may have helped him propel himself through the inescapable moments of self-doubt to the distinguished trajectory his professional life took.

It may not be accidental, though, that in a very white, very male chemistry department, Dr. Lu Valle was the one who put himself in my path when I was doubting myself most and reassured me that I would do just fine. Maybe he knew what it was like to have someone provide that kind of support when you need it.

I count myself as lucky that, in his retirement, Dr. Lu Valle still felt that the chemistry department was a home to him. Because of him, that department and the larger community of chemists felt like more of a home to me.

I am science, and so can you!

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Following up on my post yesterday about my own journey with science, I wanted to offer some words of encouragement to those who are still in the early stages of their own journey. I was prompted to write them by Dr. Isis, as part of her excellent and inspiring Letters to Our Daughters Project. Dr. Isis launched this project to fill a particular need she saw for connecting young women making their way through scientific education and careers with the perspectives and wisdom — and most of all the stories — of more senior women who had navigated some of the same terrain.

While the exhortations below were initially addressed to our scientific daughters, I hope that they may also be of use to our scientific sons.

As you pursue an education in science, and perhaps consider a career in science, you will encounter challenges. Do not let these challenges put you off. While science can be beautiful, captivating, and deeply satisfying, it can also be hard. The people around you who seem to find it totally easy did not always (or will not always) find it so. If they did, chances are they were just skimming the surface, missing some of the scientific puzzles worth puzzling over; once you notice them, it’s hard to let go of them.

Doing science is something that is learned. It is not an intrinsic quality of a person. This means that you are not allowed to decide you are bad at it if you haven’t been immersed in learning it. And, if you want to learn how to do science — and want it enough to devote your effort to it — you can.

Understand that part of the challenge is not the mechanics of doing experiments or fieldwork, but the big gap between learning information and making new knowledge. You will need to be patient with yourself as you learn and you will have to refrain from doubting that you could be clever enough to make new knowledge. Many people less clever than you have done it.

Assume that you will need help from others (to learn strategies for devising empirical tests of hypotheses, to learn experimental techniques, to learn good ways to analyze data, to learn how to fix equipment when it breaks, to learn how to file the necessary paperwork). Don’t be shy about asking for help, and don’t be stingy about offering your own help to others. The building of scientific knowledge requires a community, and grown-up scientists ask for help all the time. (Sometimes they call this “networking”, other times they call it “directing graduate research”.)

If you can, join a research group where people cooperate and collaborate. Sharing information makes the climb up the learning curve less lonely, more fruitful, and frequently even something resembling fun. There’s also a useful side effect here: you end up nurturing each other’s excitement about doing science.

Make a point of taking stock on a regular basis, so you appreciate all the knowledge and skills you have gained. Of course, you’ll also be keeping track of the knowledge and skills that you don’t have yet, but want. (That list always seems longer, but there’s nothing wrong with that. It means you’re unlikely to end up with nothing to do.)

Now we get to a big issue: After you immerse yourself in learning how to do science, what about careers? Will you automatically be a scientist when you grow up? And what happens if you decide you want to be something else?

Please trust me that putting yourself out to learn how to do science — and doing actual science as you are learning this — is a worthy end in itself. Building understanding, even if it’s just your own, is a good thing, whether or not you end up deciding to make doing science your life’s work. And deciding to make something else your life’s work does not undo what you’ve learned, nor what you’ve contributed to building new chunks of knowledge, nor what you may have contributed to the experiences of your colleagues climbing up the learning curve.

You can still love science and see other pursuits. Science can handle that kind of relationship, and your happiness matters.

If you decide that you want doing science to be your life’s work — if it feels like science is making a claim on your heart — the perennial problems of the job market may present daunting challenges.

Don’t give up.

If your heart is set on doing science, find a way to make it so. Pay attention to the advice your mentors and colleagues have to offer about finding a scientific career, but be ready to think out of the PI-at-an-R01-university box. There are many other situations where one can do science and be happy. (This is another one of those instances where it’s good to ask for help and to share information.)

Make sure the grown-up scientists training you understand your devotion to science. Nudge them to live up to their responsibilities to create conditions where there is room for the people who are devoted to science to keep making contributions within the field, and to have their contributions valued.

If your choice is not to go forward as a researcher in the field in which you received your scientific training, keep in touch with the grown-ups who trained you. Let them know that your appreciation for science has not wavered, even if you’ve chosen to make different kinds of contributions. Maybe, as you’re catching up with each other, you will even recognize some of the ways that the things you are doing are of value to science and scientists.

You may have a personal relationship with Science, but you will also have an important relationship with the scientific community. When this community raises you to be a grown-up scientist, you can leave home and make your own way in the world, but the connection to the community doesn’t ever really go away.

May this community be a source of strength and comfort to you, whatever path you choose.

I am science … or am I?

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Kevin Zelnio kicked it off on Twitter with a hashtag, and then wrote a blog post that shared the details of his personal journey with science. Lots of folks have followed suit and shared their stories, too — so many that I can’t even begin to link them without leaving something wonderful out. (Search the blogs and Twitter for #iamscience and you’ll find them.)

I’ve been trying to figure out the best way to tell my own “I am science” story, but it’s complicated. Thus, I’m preemptively declaring this my first pass, and reserving the right to come back at it from a different angle (or two, or three) later.

One of the things I mentioned in my story at the ScienceOnline 2012 banquet is that I have always loved science. As far back as I can remember, I have wanted to understand how the pieces of my world work. I have thrilled at utility (and fun) of the problem-solving strategies that are part of a scientific approach to the world. I have contemplated the different observational, experimental, and conceptual tools different scientific disciplines bring to the table (and the ways that directing these different toolboxes to the same phenomena can give us starkly different understandings of just what is going on).

I wanted to learn science. I wanted to do science. But I lived in a culture that took pains to make it clear that girls and women were not supposed to be into science, so I should just cut it out.

Luckily for my love of science, well-behaved was not really a tool in my personal toolbox, at least when it came to edicts that got in the way of goals that mattered to me.

I probably got by with the normal ration of sexist crap. For example, I had the junior high math teacher who was convinced (and did not hide this conviction from his students) that Girls Just Cannot Do Math. Finishing geometry in one quarter so I could get the hell out of his classroom (for the matrix algebra class at the high school) was not just liberatory, but it let me give him a metaphorical poke in the eye. It did not, however, change his conviction about girls and math. I had the guidance counselor who was concerned that I was overloading with “hard” (i.e., math and science) courses when maybe it would be better if I took some home ec., or even a study hall.


As I went to a women’s college, I actually skipped the bulk of the classroom sexism I heard about from peers at other universities. None of my chemistry or physics professors started with the assumption that it was weird to have women in the classroom or the lab, which was nice. I did find out later that at least one of the professors had made offhand comments that chemistry majors at my alma mater probably weren’t “up to” graduate programs like the one I went to. Unless this professor was thinking that the graduate school experience should be all margaritas and hot stone massages, I have no idea what this impression was based on; in my graduating class, I was a fair to middling chemistry major (as some of the comments in my lab notebooks attest) — not one of the stars by any stretch of the imagination — and I was sufficiently “up to” the graduate program that I earned my Ph.D. in just over four years.


Of course, I got to bask in the sexism provided by students of a nearby technical school, which my boyfriend at the time happened to attend. Said boyfriend had taken to posting photocopies of each of my grad school acceptance letters on his door, proclaiming to the world (or at least to the frat) what a glorious geek his girlfriend was. After acceptance number 5 (out of 5 applications, to top-10 schools) was posted, a frat-brother said, “Wow, she must have applied to a lot of schools.” When told that the number of acceptances equalled the number of applications, he replied, “Ohh — affirmative action.”


Because clearly, how else could a chick (from a women’s college, no less) get into top graduate programs in chemistry?


And you know, that view was shared by at least some of the men in the graduate program I attended. Because nearly a quarter of our incoming class was female, it was clear to them that affirmative action had been in high gear during the admissions process. (Meanwhile, I was looking at the numbers and thinking, “Where the hell are the rest of the women?”) Women who did very good research, who got publishable results (and publications), and who got their Ph.D.s in four or five years (rather than six or seven or eight) were frequently looked upon with suspicion. They must be getting extra breaks from the system. Or maybe it was that their research focus was not very … significant. (There were never any reasoned arguments to back up the claims that a particular research focus was trivial; it just must be, because … well, she’s doing it.)

Meanwhile, of course, female TAs (in classes like thermodynamics) were treated with contempt by undergraduates. In instances where problem sets and solution sets disagreed about an answer, the fact that the solution set was prepared by a female was treated as reason enough to question its correctness.

Because women don’t really understand physical chemistry as well as men do (even, apparently, men who have not yet taken physical chemistry).


The fact that all of this garbage was clearly recognizable as garbage at the time didn’t make dealing with it any less tiresome. Some days there was barely enough energy just to do my own homework, grade the stacks of problem sets, and try to get things in the lab to function as they should. Keeping myself from punching the noses of the people who treated me as an interloper in science because I was a woman took up energy I could have used for other things.


Sexist crap not withstanding, I made it through. I got my Ph.D. in physical chemistry.

And then, things took an unexpected turn.

I was trying to write an NSF proposal to get funding for a post-doc I had lined up. I was very interested in the research in the lab in which I was planning to work. Indeed, I had been pretty enthuisiastic about the whole thing while I put together an NIH proposal to fund postdoctoral research in that lab. I could definitely imagine three years worth of learning about systems and measurment techniques that were new to me, and I could see it building on (and drawing upon) the things I had learned in my doctoral program in interesting ways.


But the NSF proposal I was writing was such that I could not describe the research project I was planning to undertake as a post-doc. Rather, the task was to describe the first project I envisioned undertaking as a principal investigator. In other words, tell us what you’ll contribute when you are officially a grown up scientist.


Now, I could think of lots of projects I would be qualified to pursue. I could even work out interesting projects in my general area of expertise that would be fundable. But, I was having trouble putting my heart into any of them. Imagining myself setting up a lab of my own to pursue any of these lines of research made me … sad.


I tried to ignore the sad feeling. I tried to put it down to slothful avoidance of the thinking and writing involved in the NSF proposal. But then, every time I’d try to make myself think past the few years of the impending post-doc, I got the same sad, empty feeling.


I knew I was still fascinated by science and its workings, still moved by the elegant model or the clever experiment. But it was becoming clear to me that in my heart I didn’t want to do science for the rest of my life. Serious reflection got me to the reasons: Doing science (i.e., being able to get funding to do science) would require that I focus my attention on the minutiae of a particular system or a particular problem; this is the approach that seems most effective in yielding the data and insight that solves scientific problems. But, the questions that kept me up at night were much broader questions about how, more generally, experiments tell us anything about the deep structure of the universe, how different methodological assumptions make the same phenomena tractable in different ways, what balance of hard-headed skepticism and willingness to entertain speculative hypotheses scientists needed to get the job done …


These were questions, clearly, that I would get into trouble for making the focus of my research were I working in a chemistry department. They had the smell of philosophy all over them. So I had to choose between being kept up at night by questions I couldn’t pursue professionally and pursuing questions I was not so interested in for a living, or admitting that my interest in science was primarily driven by an interest in philosophical questions and get myself the necessary training as a philosopher to pursue them. In some ways living a lie would have been the path of least resistance, but given how little I enjoyed being with me as I contemplated a loveless marriage to a scientific career, I figured I’d probably me cutting myself off from fellowship with other humans as well. So, I made the entirely selfish decision to do what I thought would make me happy.

Here, believe me when I tell you that it felt like a selfish decision in the time — not like a luxurious self-indulgence, but out and out selfishness. I leaked out of the pipeline. I could have improved the gender balance in science by one, and I didn’t. Instead of helping the sisters, I pursued my own individual happiness.


This is the thing I hate most about pervasive sexism. It makes your personal choices important to others in a way that they wouldn’t be if you were just an ordinary human being. It’s hard not to feel that I have let down people I have never even met by leaving the sparse ranks of women scientists, or that I have handed myself over to the pundits: one more example of a woman who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, hack it in science.


None of which is to say that my relationship with science is over.

My professional life as an academic philosopher is tied up with understanding how science, and the community that does science, works. If anything, I feel more connected to the intellectual enterprise as a whole, and its connection to other aspects of human flourishing, than I did when I was in the trenches working as a chemist. As an educator, I have an opportunity I might not have had if I were teaching primarily chemistry majors to help folks who fear science understand it better. As it happens, I also have the opportunity to teach lots of science majors (in my “Ethics in Science” course) how ethics matter to scientific knowledge-building, and to the project of sharing a world with non-scientists. Since I’m tickled to be paid to think about the questions that keep me up at night, I have enthusiasm and energy I might not be able to muster otherwise to call shenanigans on misrepresentations of the scientific enterprise, whether by policy makers or science teachers.

Science has my devotion as a philosopher; as a chemist, chances are I would have just been going through the motions.

I may have left the lab bench, but I haven’t left the conversation.

Occasionally, though, I have to grapple with the question of whether I’m in the conversation as an insider or an outsider. Do I really count in the tribe of science? If I don’t do science anymore, how can it make sense to claim that science is part of who I am?

I don’t know what I can say to that except that my love for science, my inclination towards scientific ways of navigating through my world, the formation of myself as a competent scientist as I was figuring out how to become an adult — these are things I cannot separate from my identity. These are features of myself I cannot turn off. If you deal with me, these are some of the facets you are likely to encounter.

Am I science? It sure feels that way to me.

My story from the ScienceOnline 2012 banquet.

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This year at ScienceOnline, the conference banquet featured storytelling organized by The Monti, a North Carolina non-profit organization dedicated to building community by getting people to share their true stories with each other. Conference goers were asked to share stories on the theme of “connections”. The stories had to be true, and storytellers had to tell them without notes.

The seven stories told at the banquet provided a kaleidoscopic view of what “connections” might mean to a bunch of people involved in doing science, or teaching science, or communicating science, or trying to negotiate their own relationship with science in their personal and professional lives.

I feel honored that I got to tell my story as part of this event. My narrative was about connections between what things were like for me as a kid and how I’d like things to be different for my own kids, between online discussions and outcomes in the three-dimensional world, between my comfort zone and situations where I know I am out of my depth.

You can listen to the audio of me actually telling my story here. (It’s #3 in the list; I haven’t been able to figure out a way to grab just my story and embed it here, and you probably want to listen to the other stories, too, because they’re all really good.)

Here’s a photo of me telling the story (taken by official ScienceOnline 2012 photographer Maggie Pingolt.

Partway through the story, it will become relevant.

And, here’s a transcript-like text version of the story. I’ve taken out umm-like things.

So, like a lot of people in the room, I guess, I have always known that I loved science, but I grew up in a culture that told me that I shouldn’t, because I’m a girl.

And, between the TV, and the toy commercials, and my peers, and the teachers, the message was: “Look, science is not girls’ stuff. Science is not something girls are supposed to like. You are supposed to spend your time figuring out how to be like girls are, which is pretty, and pink, and neat, and well-behaved.” I did not want to be any of those things. I did not know how to be any of those things. I did not see how being any of those things was going to get my hands on the science-y stuff I wanted to do. So what was the point?

So, as you can imagine, school was not a lot of fun, because on the one hand, I had my peers making life crap because I could not perform femininity. And, I had teachers making my life crap, saying: “Look, no, I don’t care that you can do the math and do the science. It’s impossible that you can do the math and do the science because you’re a girl. So, stop that!”

And, one gets through this. And, I kind of figured by the time I was a grown-up, and had kids that I was raising of my own, we were going to be past all of this in our culture — that we would have fixed this particular blind spot we have. But the first time we cracked open the educational toy catalog, when our kids were old enough for those: hit in the face with the heavily gendered science kits.

And they come in two flavors: they come in the science kits, and the science kits for girls. And the science kits for girls of course come in a pink box, and they are science that concerns what girls are supposed to want to do, which is make lip gloss, or make bubble bath, or maybe grow pretty crystals. And the pictures on the box have cartoon girls with eye shadow and off-the-shoulder blouses, as if to say: “Look, dear, there’s nothing about doing this activity that is going to get in the way of your really important task of figuring out how to be conforming to our gendered expectations of you.”

The boys’ kits, meanwhile, had cool stuff — I mean, you got to take things apart. You got to blow things up. You got to examine the world on a really small scale. This is stuff I wanted to do — and got to do, luckily, when I was a kid, but only because my mother was as much of a rebel against this as I was.

What the girls are offered is the pink microscopes that don’t magnify as well as the blue microscopes do. Instead of getting kits where you get to blow stuff up, you get to make bath bombs, and as it turns out, bath bombs do not actually explode. Which is kind of a rip off.

So, of course, when I started blogging, this was one of the things I blogged about — because a good rant is what keeps a blogger going in the morning. And this was like five years ago. So I got my rant on. And of course, this November, those of you who watch the Twitters knew that Ed Yong tweeted about the WILD! Science* website selling extremely gendered science kits.

So it’s still going on! And people were like, “Yeah, we should blog about this some more!”

I’ll be honest: I was tired. I did not feel like blogging about this again. I said, I have been banging my head against this particular wall with this culture, and, you know, maybe I’d like to bang my head against a different wall that might move a little. But, I took a breath. I said, OK, everyone’s doing it, so I’ll try to explain again what it is about these kits that I find problematic — that they’re not really trying to interest kids in science so much as saying the only hook we’ve got with girls is their femininity. And, they’re not actually cultivating an interest in science so much as reminding girls: even in science, you are expected to do this femininity thing or you will get crap.

So, I blogged about it, and then a really exciting thing happened in December. In December, Edmund Scientific announced on their blog that they had noticed these blog posts, and letters they had gotten, emails they had gotten from customers, and they understood the criticism, and they recognized that they were sending out a message that they did not want to send out as they were selling science kits. And they said, we’re going to stop. They said, we are going to no longer sell boys’ science kits and girls’ science kits; they’re now all science kits for whatever kind of kid wants to do it.

And I was really, really excited. You know, all of us sort of being cranky eventually, I guess … every now and then we get this incremental piece of change.

I was so excited that afternoon, and I had to tell my kids, because, you know, you’ve got to share your excitement and your tweeps get tired of it so your kids have to listen to the overflow.

I should tell you something about my kids, something I sort of keep on the down-low on blogs ’cause of creepy internet stalker types. My kids are daughters.

The oldest one’s in seventh grade, the youngest one’s in fifth grade. So, they’re twelve and ten. The older one … I think maybe there was a six month stretch in kindergarten where she experimented with officially sanctioned femininity as recognized by our culture and then decided it just was not worth the trouble, and hasn’t really bothered with it since.

The ten-year-old is a pretty pink princess.

Which makes our relationship with each other complicated, because as I told you before, I don’t really do femininity. She actually tried to help me with my outfit for tonight, but in the end she said, “Please don’t tell them I was involved in this.” We’re different, she and I.

But, she was the one, when I told her this news about this company selling science kits that decided to drop the heavy gendering, she was the one who got really excited and gave me a hug and gave me a high five.

Because both of my kids — the tomboy and the pretty princess — both of them love science. The ten-year-old who loves to dress up, who loves to wear pantyhose, for God’s sake, who asked for a lint-roller for Christmas — she loves to do science. She is also a fierce goalie for her soccer team, and she can tell fart jokes with the best of them, and this is because, unlike what the marketers would have you believe, a pretty pink princess has facets.

So, as we’re celebrating this, I’m sort of keeping up with the discussion in the blogosphere. And there’s some discussion going on saying, “Well, OK, heavily gendered science kits: probably problematic. But, maybe we’re doing some pink-bashing here. Maybe we’ve got to make the world safe for pink microscopes, too.”

There was sort of this “click!” in my head when I remembered — oh wait, it’s not just that we live in a culture that says “Girls can’t do science,” and we’ve got to deal with that; or that girls need to be feminine, and we’ve got to deal with that. We live in a culture where we have this idea that scientists need to be a certain way.

So we’ve gone from where I was when I was in school, having teachers tell me, “You can’t do science ’cause you’re a girl,” to now maybe the teachers are saying , “Well, you’re probably not going to be into science because you’re a girly girl.” You can do science, but you’ve got to be one of those girls who thinks the whole femininity thing is not something you want to spend any kind of time with.

And that’s a problem, too.

And I thought back to my misspent scientific youth in a physical chemistry lab, where absolutely the smartest, the best scientist in that lab aside from my PI was a fourth year graduate student who graduated after her fourth year with a ton of publications in the Journal of Physical Chemistry. But people outside of our lab thought she had all kinds of help, or that her work must not be too significant, and the main reason they seemed to think that is ’cause she did her hair, and she wore make up, and she did her nails, and she was kind of a grown up pretty princess. If they had bothered to talk to her about her science, if they had bothered to look inside her notebooks — which, I grant, were kept in loopy script, sometimes in pink ink — they would have seen that she was fiercely intelligent and frighteningly organized in her attack on the research questions that she pursued. She was an astonishingly good scientist, and she was made to feel like an outsider in our scientific community simply because she did femininity.

And we’ve got to cut this out. We have to cut this out.

We not only have to, as a culture, get over the idea that boys have to be a certain way and girls have to be a certain way, and that the certain way girls have to be is not compatible with doing science. We also have to get over the idea that to be a good scientist you have to be a certain kind of person, and that’s not the kind of person who’s going to get his or her nails done.

Because ultimately, the world I want to be in, the world I want for my daughters — for the tomboy and the pretty princess — is one where they can be authentically who they are, and they can love science, and they can pursue science, and it doesn’t matter what else they like.

Thank you.
_____
*At the banquet, I erroneously said “Mad Science.” Ah, the dangers of telling a story without notes!

If you want to go back and relive the discussion of gendered science kits as it was happening last November and December, here are some links:

Science kits … for girls.
Some reasons gendered science kits may be counterproductive.
Gendered science kits aren’t so great for boys either.
How do we make room for pink microscopes? (More thoughts on gendered science kits.)

The WILD! Science selection of science kits for girls.
The Edmund Scientific blog post that filled my heart with joy.

Things to read on my other blog: #scio12 preparations, truthiness at NYT, and an interview with a chloroplast.

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For those of you who mostly follow my writing here on “Doing Good Science,” I thought I should give you a pointer to some things I’ve posted so far this month (which is almost half-over already?!) on my other blog, “Adventures in Ethics and Science”. Feel free to jump in to the discussions in the comments over there. Or, if you prefer, go ahead and discuss them here.

The month kicked off with a bunch of posts looking forward to ScienceOnline 2012, which is next week. First, on the issue of what to pack:

Packing for #scio12: plague relief.
Packing for #scio12: what are you drinking?
Packing for #scio12: sharing space with others.
Packing for #scio12: plumbing the inky depths.

Then, a discussion of what’s special about an unconference: Looking ahead to #scio12: the nature of the unconference. In this post, I put a call out for contributions to the wikis for the two sessions I’ll be helping to moderate: one (with Amy Freitag) on “Citizens, experts, and science”, the other (with Christie Wilcox) on “Blogging Science While Female”. Those wiki pages are just calling out for ideas, questions, or useful links. (Your ideas, questions, or useful links! What are you waiting for?)

After that, my response to a recent blog post by the New York Times’s Public Editor: Straightforward answers to questions we shouldn’t even have to ask: New York Times edition.

Finally, courtesy of my elder offspring, Friday Sprog Blogging: Interview with a Chloroplast..

Lads’ mags, sexism, and research in psychology: an interview with Dr. Peter Hegarty (part 2).

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In this post, I continue my interview with Dr. Peter Hegarty, a social psychologist at the University of Surrey and one of the authors of ” ‘Lights on at the end of the party’: Are lads’ mags mainstreaming dangerous sexism?”, which was published in The British Journal of Psychology in December. My detailed discussion of that paper is here. The last post presented part 1 of our interview, in which Dr. Hegarty answered questions about the methodology of this particular research, as well as about some of the broader methodological differences between research in psychology and in sciences that are focused on objects of study other than humans.

Janet Stemwedel: It’s been pointed out that the university students that seem to be the most frequent subjects of psychological research are WEIRD (Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic). Is the WEIRDness of university students as subjects in this research something that should make us cautious about the strength of the conclusions we draw?  Or are university students actually a reasonably appropriate subject pool from the point of view of exploring how lads’ mags work?

Peter Hegarty: According to the historian Kurt Danziger in his book Constructing the Subject, students became an unmarked “normative” subject population for psychologists, at least in the United States, between the world wars. Since then, criticisms of over-reliance on student samples have been common (such as those of Quin McNemar in the 1940s, or David Sears in the 1980s). Within the history of this criticism, perhaps what is most distinct about the recent argument about WIERDness is that it draws on the developments in cultural psychology of the last 20 years or so. For this specific study, our rational for studying young people on a campus was not only convenience; they are also the target market for these magazines, by virtue of their age, and by virtue of possessing the disposable income to purchase them.

May I take the time to offer a slightly broader perspective on the problem of under- and over-representation of social groups in psychology? The issue is not simply one of who gets included, and who does not. This is because groups can be disempowered and science compromised by being erased (as the WIERD criticism presumes), and groups can be disempowered when they are consistently located within the psychologists’ gaze – as in Foucaultian disciplinary power. African-Americans are oversampled in the US literature on forensic psychology, but that literature is not anti-racist, it’s largely based on a “deficit” model of race (Carter & Forsythe, 2007). The issue is not simply one of inclusion or exclusion, but one of how inclusion happens, as sociologist Steven Epstein’s work on inclusive paradigms in medicine nicely shows.

In other experiments and content analyses, my colleagues and I have found that people spontaneously explain group differences by attending to lower power groups more of the time. In our own research we have observed this pattern in scientists publications and in explanations produced in the lab with regard to race, gender, and sexuality, for example (Hegarty & Buechel, 2006; Hegarty & Pratto, 2004). On the face of it, this might lead to greater stereotyping of the lower power “marked” group. Indeed, as Suzanne Bruckmueller’s work on linguistic framing subtly shows, once a group is positioned as “the effect to be explained” in an account of group differences, then people tend to infer that the group has less power (Bruckmüller & Abele, 2010). Our work suggests that to trouble the “normative” status that WIERD people occupy in our ontologies, that inclusion is necessary but not sufficient. It’s also important to reframe our questions about difference to think concretely about normative groups. In the case of our lads’ mags research, we were heartened that people were prompted to reframe questions about the widespread problem of violence against women away from the small category of convicted rapists, to ask broader questions about how such violence is normalized.

JS: A lot of scientists seem to have a love/hate relationship with mass media. They want the public to understand their research and why it’s interesting and important, but media coverage sometimes gets the details badly wrong, or obliterates the nuance.  And, given the subject matter of your research (which the average person might reasonably connect to his or her own concerns more easily than anything we might learn about the Higgs boson), it seems like misunderstandings of what the research means could get amplified pretty quickly.  What has your experience been as far as the media coverage of your research?  Are there particular kinds of issues you’d like the public to grasp better when they read or hear about this kind of research?

PH: Your question touches on the earlier point about the difference between the human and natural sciences. Our work is caught up in “looping effects” as people interpret it for themselves, but the Higgs boson doesn’t care if the folks in CERN discover it or not. (I think, I’m no expert on sub-atomic physics!) Although some research that I released last year on sexist language got good coverage in the media (Hegarty, Watson, Fletcher & McQueen, 2011), the speed and scale of the reaction to the Horvath et al. (2011) paper was a new experience for me, so I am learning about the media as I go.

There is no hard and fast boundary between “the media” and “the public” who are ‘influenced’ by that media anymore; I’m not sure there ever was one. The somewhat ‘viral’ reaction to this work on the social networking sites such as twitter was visibly self-correcting in ways that don’t fit with social scientists’ theories that blame the media for beguiling the public. Some journalists misunderstood the procedures of Experiment 1 in our study, and it was misdescribed in some media sources. But on Twitter, folk were re-directing those who were reproducing that factual error to the Surrey website. Overall, watching the Twitter feeds reminded me most of the experience of giving a class of students an article to discuss and watching a very useful conversation emerge about what the studies had hypothesized, what they had found, how much you might conclude from the results, and what the policy implications might be. I am somewhat more optimistic about the affordances of social media for education as a result of this experience.

JS: Given the connection between your research questions in this research and actual features of our world that might matter to us quite a lot (like how young men view and interact with the women with whom they share a world), it seems like ultimately we might want to *use* what we learn from the research to make things better, rather than just saying, “Huh, that’s interesting.”  What are the challenges to moving from description to prescription here?  Are there other “moving parts” of our social world you think we need to understand better to respond effectively to what we learn from studies like these?

Related to what I’ve said above, I would like people to see the research as a “red flag” about the range and character of media that young people now read, and which are considered “normal.” There are now numerous anecdotes on the web of people who have been prompted by this research to look at a lads’ mag for the first time – and been surprised or shocked by what they see. We are also in contact with some sex educators about how this work might be used to educate men for a world in which this range of media exists. Precisely because we think this research might have relevance for a broad range of people who care about the fact that people should have pleasure, intimacy, and sex without violence, bullying and hatred,

We have suggested that it should prompt investment in sex education rather than censorship. In so doing, we are adopting an ‘incrementalist’ approach to people’s intelligence about sex and sexual literacy. Carol Dweck’s work shows that children and young people who believe their intelligence to be a fixed ‘entity’ do not fare as well academically as those who believe their intelligence might be something ‘incremental’ that can be changed through effort. Censorship approaches seem to us to be based on fear, and to assume a rather fixed limit to the possibilities of public discourse about sex. We do not make those assumptions, but we fear that they can become self-fulfilling prophecies.

JS: How do you keep your prescriptive hunches from creeping into the descriptive project you’re trying to do with your research?

I’m not sure that it is possible or desirable to exclude subjectivity from science; your last question obliged me to move from description to prescription. It is sometimes striking how much many scientists want to be ‘above politics’ and influence policy, to advocate and remain value-neutral, to change the world, but not to intervene etc. My thinking on this matter borrows more from Sandra Harding’s view of ‘strong objectivity,’ and particularly her idea that the science we get is affected by the range of people included in its production and the forms of social relationships in which they participate. I also think that Stephen Shapin’s book A Social History of Truth is a useful albeit distal explanation of why the question of subjectivity in science is often seen as an affront to honour and the opposite of reasoned dispassionate discussion. In the UK, there is now an obligation on scientists to engage non-academic publics by reporting’ impact summaries to the government as part of national exercises for documenting research excellence. However, this policy can overlook the importance of two-way dialogue between academic and non-academic audiences about how we create different kinds of knowledge for different kinds of purposes. For those reasons, I’m grateful for the opportunity to participate in a more dialogical forum about science and ethics like this one.

Bibliography

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Carter, R.T., & Forsythe, J.M. (2007). Examining race and culture in psychology journals: The case of forensic psychology. Professional Psychology: Theory and Practice, 38, 133-142.

Danziger, K. (1990). Constructing the Subject: Historical Origins of Psychological Research. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Dweck, C. (2000). Self-theories: Their Role in Motivation, Personality and Development. Psychology Press.

Epstein, S. (2007). Inclusion: The Politics of Difference in Medical Research. Chicago: Univeristy of Chicago Press.

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Hacking, I. (1995). The looping effects of human kinds. In Dan Sperber, David Premack and Ann James Premack (Eds.), Causal Cognition: A Multi-Disciplinary Debate (pp. 351-383). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

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Hegarty P.J., Watson, N., Fletcher L, & McQueen, G. (2011) When gentlemen are first and ladies are last: Effects of gender stereotypes on the order of romantic partners’ names. British Journal of Social Psychology, 50, 21-35.

Horvath, M.A.H., Hegarty, P., Tyler, S. & Mansfield, S. (2011).“Lights on at the end of the party”: Are Lads Mags’ Mainstreaming Dangerous Sexism? British Journal of Psychology. Available from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.2044-8295.2011.02086.x/abstract

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Lads’ mags, sexism, and research in psychology: an interview with Dr. Peter Hegarty (part 1).

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Back in December, there was a study that appeared in The British Journal of Psychology that got a fair amount of buzz. The paper (Horvath, M.A.H., Hegarty, P., Tyler, S. & Mansfield, S., ” ‘Lights on at the end of the party’: Are lads’ mags mainstreaming dangerous sexism?” British Journal of Psychology. DOI:10.1111/j.2044-8295.2011.02086.x) looked the influence that magazines aimed at young men (“lads’ mags”) might have on how the young people who read them perceive their social reality. Among other things, the researchers found that the subjects in the study found the descriptions of women given by convicted sex offenders and lads’ mags are well nigh indistinguishable, and that when a quote was identified as from a lads’ mag (no matter what its actual source), subjects were more likely to say that they identified with the view it expressed than if the same quote was identified as coming from a rapist.

I wrote about the details of this research in a post on my other blog.

One of the authors of the study, Dr. Peter Hegarty, is someone I know a little from graduate school (as we were in an anthropology of science seminar together one term). He was gracious enough to agree to an interview about this research, and to answer some of my broader questions (as a physical scientist turned philosopher) about what doing good science looks like to a psychologist. Owing to its length, I’m presenting the interview in two posts, this one and one that will follow it tomorrow.

Janet Stemwedel: Is there something specific that prompted this piece of research — a particular event, or the Nth repetition of a piece of “common wisdom” that made it seem like it was time to interrogate it?  Or is this research best understood as part of a broader project (perhaps of identifying pieces of our social world that shape our beliefs and attitudes)?

Peter Hegarty: We came to this research for different reasons. Miranda [Horvath] had been working more consistently on the role of lads’ mags in popular culture than I had been (see Coy & Horvath, 2011). Prompted by another students’ interests, I had published a very short piece earlier this year on the question of representations of ‘heteroflexible’ women in lads’ mags (Hegarty & Buechel, 2011). The two studies reported in Horvath, Hegarty, Tyler & Mansfield (2011) were conducted as Suzannah Tyler and Sophie Mansfield’s M.Sc. Dissertations in Forensic Psychology, a course provided jointly by the University of Surrey and Broadmoor Hospital. Miranda and I took the lead on writing up the research after Miranda moved to Middlesex University in 2010.

JS: When this study was reported in the news, as the Twitters were lighting up with discussion about this research, some expressed concern that the point of the research was to identify lads’ mags as particularly bad (compared to other types of media), or as actually contributing to rapes.  Working from the information in the press release (because the research paper wasn’t quite out yet), there seemed to be some unclarity about precisely what inferences were being drawn from the results and (on the basis of what inferences people thought you *might* be drawing) about whether the research included appropriate controls — for example, quotes about women from The Guardian, or from ordinary-men-who-are-not-rapists.  Can you set us straight on what the research was trying to find out and on what inferences it does or does not support?  And, in light of the hypotheses you were actually testing, can you discuss the issue of experimental controls?

PH: Our research was focused on lads’ mags –- rather than other media –- because content analysis research had shown that those magazines were routinely sexist, operated in an advice-giving mode, and often dismissed their social influence. This is not the case –- as far as I know — with regard to The Guardian. So there was a rationale to focus on lads’ mags that was not based on prior research. We hoped to test our hypothesis that lads’ mags might be normalizing hostile sexism. This idea hung on two matters; is there an overlap in the discourse of lads’ mags and something that most people would accept as hostile sexism? Does that content appear more acceptable to young men when it appears to come from a lads’ mag? The two studies mapped onto these goals. In one, we found that young women and men couldn’t detect the source of a quote as coming from a convicted rapist’s interview or a lads’ mag. In another, young men identified more with quotes that they believed to have come from lads’ mags rather than convicted rapists.

JS: While we’re on the subject of controls, it strikes me that good experimental design in psychological research is probably different in some interesting ways from good experimental design in, say, chemistry.  What are some misconceptions those of us who have more familiarity with the so-called “hard sciences” have about social science research?  What kind of experimental rigor can you achieve without abandoning questions about actual humans-in-the-world?

PH: You are right that these sciences might have different ontologies, because psychology is a human science. There are a variety of perspectives on this, with scholars such as Ian Hacking arguing for a separate ontology of the human sciences and more postmodern authors such as Bruno Latour arguing against distinctions between humans and things. Generally, I would be loath do describe differences between the sciences in terms of the metaphor of “hardness,” because the term is loaded with implicature. First, psychology is a potentially reflexive science about people, conducted by people and is characterized by what the philosopher Ian Hacking calls “looping effects;” people’s thoughts, feelings and behaviours are themselves influenced by psychological theories about them. Second, measurement in psychology is more often dependent on normalization and relative judgment (as in an IQ test, or a 7-point Likert item on a questionnaire, for example). Third, there is a lot of validity to the Foucaultian argument that the “psy- disciplines” have often been used in the service of the state, to divide people into categories of “normal” and “abnormal” people, so that different people might be treated very differently without offending egalitarian ideologies. Much of clinical psychology and testing takes this form.

Critics of psychology often stop there. By so doing, they overlook the rich tradition within psychology of generating knowledge that troubles forms of normalization, by suggesting that the distinction between the “normal” and the “abnormal” is not as firm as common sense suggests. Studies in this tradition might include Evelyn Hooker’s (1957) demonstration – from that dark era when homosexuality was considered a mental illness – that there are no differences in the responses of gay and straight men to personality tests. One might also include David Rosenhan’s (1973) study in which ordinary people managed to deceive psychiatrists that they were schizophrenic. A third example might be stereotype threat research (e.g., by Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson, 1995), which shows that the underperformance of African Americans on some standardized tests reflects not genuine ability, but a situational constraint introduced by testing conditions. Like these studies, we would hope ours would trouble’s people’s sense of what they take for granted about differences between people. In particular we hope that people will reconsider what they think they know about “extreme” sexism – that leads to incarceration – and “normal” sexism, that is now typical for young men to consume. I would urge academic critics of psychology – particularly those that focus on its complicity with Foucaultian disciplinary power, and the power of the state more generally – to develop more critiques that can account for such empirical work.

For the last half a century, “rigor” in empirical psychology has been organized by the language of validity and reliability of measurement (Cronbach & Meehl, 1955). Psychologists also tend to be Popperians, who construct “falsifiable” theories and use Fischerian inferential statistics to construct experiments that afford the possibility of falsification. However, inferential norms are changing in the discipline for three reasons. First, the rise of neuroscience has lead to a more inductive form of inference in which mapping and localization plays a greater role in scientific explanation. Second, social psychologists are increasingly engaging with structural equation modelling and offering confirmatory models of social processes. Third, there is “statistical reform” in psychology, away from the ritual of statistical significance testing toward making variability more transparent through the reporting of confidence intervals, effect sizes, and exact significance values. See Spellman (2012) for one very recent discussion of what’s happening within the genre of scientific writing in psychology around retaining rigor and realism in psychological science.

JS: One thing that struck me in reading the paper was that instruments have been developed to measure levels of sexism.  Are these measures well-accepted within the community of research psychologists?  (I am guessing that if the public even knew about them, they would be pretty controversial in some quarters … maybe the very quarters whose denizens would get high scores on these measures!)

We used two well-established measures; the ambivalent sexism inventory and the AMMSA, and one measure of endorsement of lads’ mags that we developed ourselves for the study. We describe some of the previous findings of other researchers who have used these scales to examine individual differences in responses to vignettes about sexual violence in the article. We feel more confident of the measure we developed ourselves because it was highly correlated with all other measures of sexism and because it was highly correlated with men’s identification with quotes from rapists and from lads’ mags. In other words, we followed the logic of psychologists such as Lee Cronbach, Paul Meehl and Donald Campbell for establishing and developing the “construct validity” of the empirical scales.

* * * * *

Tomorrow, in the second part of my interview with Peter Hegarty, we discuss the WEIRD-ness of college students as subjects for psychological research, how to go from description to prescription, and what it’s like for scientists to talk about their research with the media in the age of Twitter. Stay tuned!

Bibliography

Cronbach, L. J., & Meehl, P. E. (1955). Construct validity in psychological tests. Psychological Bulletin, 52, 281-302.

Coy, M., & Horvath, M.A.H. (2011).‘Lads mags’, young men’s attitudes towards women and acceptance of myths about sexual aggression. Feminism & Psychology, 21, 144-150.

Foucault, M. (1978). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York, Random House.

Hacking, I. (1995). The looping effects of human kinds. In Dan Sperber, David Premack and Ann James Premack (Eds.), Causal Cognition: A Multi-Disciplinary Debate (pp. 351-383). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Hegarty, P., & Buechel C (2011) ‘”What Blokes Want Lesbians to be”: On FHM and the socialization of pro-lesbian attitudes among heterosexual-identified men’. Sage Publications Feminism & Psychology, 21, 240-247.

Hooker, E. (1957). The adjustment of the male overt homosexual. Journal of Projective Techniques, 21, 18-31.

Horvath, M.A.H., Hegarty, P., Tyler, S. & Mansfield, S. (2011).“Lights on at the end of the party”: Are Lads Mags’ Mainstreaming Dangerous Sexism? British Journal of Psychology. Available from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.2044-8295.2011.02086.x/abstract

Latour, B. (1993). We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Rosenhan, D.L. (1973). On being sane in insane places. Science, 179, 250-258.

Spellman, B.A. (2012). Introduction to the special section: Data, data everywhere. . . especially in my file drawer. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 7, 58-59.

Steele, C., & Aronson, J. (1995). Stereotype threat and the intellectual test performance of African Americans.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 69, 797-811.