Recently, a shooter in Buffalo, New York killed 13 people in a grocery store. In his own words, the shooter was targetting an area with a high population density of black Americans in an attempt to remove them from the country. For him, black people were an existential threat to the white population and had a genetic predisposition to acts of violence, crime, and narcissism.
The thing that surprised me as I went through his ‘manifesto’ was how many citations he had attached to his claims. The document which had a lot of disturbing content also had a lot of research articles quoted within it. I decided to do a little digging into these papers that had been cited and was dismayed with what I found.
The Dilemmas of Social Science
There was a paper in particular that the shooter claimed proved that Black people are more narcissistic and have a significantly lower IQ than white people. There were other studies that had evidence about black people being more aggressive, being more violent, and so on.
Some of these studies have been retracted because of the shoddy work they included. Others had been found to have links with white nationalist movements and eugenics but there were some studies in there which were absolutely valid! There was nothing wrong with them, they were methodologically sound, had strong statistics, and had a well-thought-out discussion. Should the authors of these valid papers assume some responsibility for the shooting?
That is dilemma number 1. Should scientists be held accountable for how their studies are interpreted?
Darwin proposed the theory of evolution which was bastardized by Nazis to promote their hate. Should we condemn Darwin for coming up with such a theory? Could Darwin really have known how his ideas would be used in the future?
There is another dilemma here.
The authors of the valid study, one, in particular, focused on Narcissism, reported that Black participants had significantly higher narcissism than white participants. The study used a self-report inventory where scores above 30 suggest concerning levels of narcissism verging on disorderly.
The problem was that the means of neither of the two groups reached anywhere close to 30. The mean for the black participants was just above 10 while that for white participants was just above 9. Statistical analysis showed that this difference was quite significant but does that mean that this difference is also significant socially?
The shooter quoted this study to mean that blacks are narcissistic and thus do not belong in a society of white people but when you really look into it, the difference was hardly concerning at a social level.
That is dilemma number 2. Should social scientists be more mindful in reporting statistically significant results and the meaning behind them?
We might often find a result that gives us a positive result, and makes us feel like our research was worth something but should we be mindful of the larger impact of what a study like this could lead to?
I don’t want to say that we should stop looking into race differences, gender differences, or other such sub-disciplines but we can be more careful with how we communicate our results in our abstracts and the final report.
What do you think about these issues? You can let me know by replying to this email or in the comments :)
PS: There is a critique to be made here of the discipline of behavioral genetics and how it impacts the perception of social groups at a genetic level but maybe that is for another day.