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Diversity in Science Is Just Good Science

According to scientists.
​Image: ​Paul K/Flickr

There's more than just a human cost to the lack of diversity in the sciences. Conducting experiments and talking about science with perspective limited to one group results in, if not bad science, then science with a low ceiling.

What people who decry the criticism of the Rosetta scientist Matt Taylor's questionable sartorial decisions fail to take into account is that diversity in the sciences is essential for reaching our full potential. It's not about ignoring a very cool accomplishment in order to stick up for people who are underrepresented in science; it's about getting ready for the next very cool accomplishment, and keeping those cool accomplishments coming.

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"Just as one cannot paint a picture (say of a scene) without taking a perspective, one can't do science without also taking a perspective, one out of a very large set of potential ones," Douglas Medin told me. "Each perspective can be true to the scene and unbiased, but different perspectives reveal different things."

Medin is a psychology professor at Northwestern University, and he has been looking at what different cultural approaches bring to science.

Cut from the same crust (1908). Image: ​Wikipedia

He told me that often the problem with a field where the researchers are disproportionately white and male isn't that the results of research are false. While the results of an experiment should, ideally, be reproducible by anyone anywhere, the questions that one asks, the hypothesis that one poses, and the conclusions that one draws are still going to be culturally informed. It's just a fact of the human experience.

"Some research is biased but, in principle, since science is a social enterprise and we insist on it being public and subject to replication often individual bias is addressed by the 'self-correcting' nature of science," he told me. "Sometimes the lack of scientist diversity does allow what one might call 'cultural bias' to enter in, as during the colonialist era when it was taken for granted by Westerners that other peoples were inferior."

The bigger problem today is what isn't done. If culture shapes your vistas, then researchers who all share a background are all looking from the same one. Certain types of inquiries yield certain types of answers. Medin is fond of the metaphor of a map, which can, depending on the intentions with which it is made, "reflect different views or representations of reality corresponding to different notions of what will be relevant to their users."

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"But just as one could make a million maps of Chicago, all of which were accurate but emphasizing different things, there are a vast number of perspectives that might be applied to understand our world," Medin said.

Every map offers a fresh perspective on the city, even if they're all also correct (or reasonably so, we haven't fact-checked every one in the video).

"When male scientists studied reproductive behaviors of nonhuman primates they focused on the role of males and as far as they went, their observations were accurate, replicable etc," Medin continued. "But when females entered the field that had a different perspective and not surprisingly, they made a number of discoveries about the role of female primates in social and reproductive behaviors. The male scientists weren't wrong but their account was incomplete just as a map of the Chicago bus routes would be for a person who wants to know the spatial distribution of American elm trees in Chicago."

Medin and Megan Bang, an educational psychology professor at the University of Washington, have been working with the American Indian Center of Chicago (AIC) and the Menominee Tribe of Wisconsin to contrast how Native and European-American youth see the natural world and their place within it. To do so, they examined how children are learn about the ecosystems around them.

The researchers examined the illustrations in books about animals. In the top-selling kids books about animals on Amazon, the animals were wearing clothing and "interacted in settings rich in human artifacts (driving cars, sleeping in beds, and so on), much like characters in a Disney movie." In books from a Native-operated literacy program, the animals were almost always in a natural habitat, acting "normally," which is to say, like the species they are.

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different ways of viewing the world reflect values and goals, and shape considerations of what is relevant to a task at hand

There were also differences in what people knew about animals. The researchers found that rural Menominee fishers were more likely than European-Americans to organize their knowledge of fish by habitat—e.g. fish found in cold, fast-moving water—while European-American fishers tend to organize their knowledge of fish by species—the "bass family," for example.

Both rural Menominee and rural European-Americans exhibited a less human-centered view of biology than urban European-Americans, and saw people as part of an ecosystem rather than apart from it.

Their research paper explained how "the different ways in which people view, conceptualize, and engage with the world…implicitly and explicitly affect knowledge construction and forms of engagement with the world. More specifically, different ways of viewing the world reflect values and goals, and shape considerations of what is relevant to a task at hand."

I asked Medin how our views of nature impact how we both study and treat it.

"Of course we can't randomly assign people to have different views, so it's not the sort of independent variable that we like to use in experiments," he said. "But [how we view nature] does tend to be correlated with culture and our research over the past few decades has found that there are strong cultural differences in understanding nature and they seem to be correlated with different ways of acting on it.

"Almost paradoxically, people who do not see themselves as being part of nature seems to have the most damaging interactions with it," he added. "A lot of this is reviewed in a book I recently did with Megan Bang, Who's Asking?: Native science, Western science and science education."

Conducting science from a single perspective—and thus, wearing a sexist shirt that potentially makes half of the world's population feel unwelcome—isn't just limiting who your coworkers are. It limits what you can do.