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How to conduct peer review
Published in John Measey, How to Publish in Biological Sciences, 2023
Your job as a reviewer will be to remain objective about the manuscript that you are reading, pointing out its merits and problems without succumbing to bias. Forming your own world view of your topic within the Biological Sciences does mean that you likely need a form of directionally motivated reasoning. For example, this is why you decide to investigate one hypothesis before another, or feel that one line of investigation is more salient to your area than another. These could be made through observations or experiences that you have had during your research, or they may come from schools of thought within your discipline. But it is important that you remain intellectually honest, to allow others to hold alternative, valid arguments. Just as it is important in your own work that you are always prepared to accept the null hypothesis as readily as you do the alternative hypothesis. One lesson revealed from reading lots of peer reviews is that reviewers find it hard to remain centred using accuracy motivated reasoning, all too often resorting to attacking the authors or their experiment (Eve et al., 2021). Your principle task is to remain intellectually honest in your review, such that you can point out faulty arguments without perverting the direction that the authors planned to take. Equally, it is important that the authors acknowledge alternative viewpoints, but not to the extent that they should be made to abandon their own interpretation.
Propaganda and Ideology
Published in David Coady, James Chase, The Routledge Handbook of Applied Epistemology, 2018
Stanley is sensitive to the relatively nuanced way in which propaganda operates in Western liberal democracies as opposed to the brazen tactics of totalitarian regimes. In support of his idea, one may note that Goebbels’s early World War II propaganda has been compared to a trombone against the flute sounds of French propaganda organized under Jean Giraudoux. Stanley brings psychological evidence to bear on the phenomenon of motivated reasoning that stands in the way of a correct assessment of facts about the world. Perception tends to accord with what people wish to believe. Desire colors the perceptions of those in power in a way that tends to justify their privileges. It also means that exploited persons don’t see themselves as exploited because they identify themselves with a group whose underprivileged status has come to be accepted as a fact of nature rather than a mutable social construction. The same flawed ideology stands in the way of the privileged seeing that they are exploiters and the have-nots seeing that they are exploited (Stanley 2015: 231ff.).
Introduction
Published in Martin Lipscomb, Exploring Evidence-based Practice, 2015
In Chapter 10, John Paley describes the disputed and contentious place of qualitative research in the hierarchy of evidence, nurse education and, by implication, EBP. Like Bernie in Chapter 9, John recognises that EBP is seen by some as privileging quantitative ways of knowing and, again, this privileging has been considered ‘an arbitrary imposition’. John further notes that powerful voices in nursing have and are seeking to raise the status of qualitative research to match that accorded to quantitative work and, in this process, weaknesses (real and imagined) in quantitative experimental design are identified and emphasised. John, on the other hand, persuasively argues that, regardless of the stridency of calls favouring qualitative inquiry, it is unclear whether ‘qualitative evidence should be “on an equal footing” with evidence derived from quantitative and experimental designs’. Furthermore, insofar as statistical tests and experimental quantitative designs strive to limit the risk of inferential error, the absence of similar procedures and protocols in qualitative studies cannot but subvert claims regarding the status and use value of those findings. Indeed, unwelcome though the observation may be, it remains the case that, without such procedures and protocols, ‘there is no way of discriminating between legitimate inference in qualitative research and various forms of cognitive bias: observer expectancy effects, belief bias, illusory correlation, availability cascade, selective perception, congruence bias, motivated reasoning, or outright wishful thinking’. To understand how and why nursing has become attached to qualitative inquiry, John notes that for ‘the past thirty years, methodological discussion in qualitative health research … has been subordinated to the requirements of postgraduate study’. This subordination is important. It has imposed constraints on the methodologies and methods that are available to students and, thus, in order that studies can be completed by individuals with minimal resources in short time periods, postgraduate nursing researchers have found it expedient to undertake small sample interview-based studies, which limit themselves to retrospective descriptions of the participants’ experience and the ‘meaning’ they attach to experience. The philosophical justifications of this approach are, however, weak. And, in addition, the social psychology literature undermines the way in which ‘meaning’ is interpreted in most nursing qualitative studies. John’s argument raises serious and awkward questions that should, if given the attention they deserve, prompt fresh thinking among educators, researchers and the consumers (readers) of research.
Bioethics and the Moral Authority of Experience
Published in The American Journal of Bioethics, 2023
Ryan H. Nelson, Bryanna Moore, Holly Fernandez Lynch, Miranda R. Waggoner, Jennifer Blumenthal-Barby
There are a number of reasons to be more skeptical of claims made by interested parties than of those made by disinterested parties, all else being equal. Motivated reasoning occurs when one comes to endorse the most desired, rather than the best supported, view (Kunda 1990). Things are easier to believe when we want them to be true, and easier to disbelieve when we want them to be false. Like motivated reasoning, emotional reasoning arguably has the potential to undermine our deliberative abilities, since “emotions can cause self-deception because they can lead to powerful desires that something be or not be the case, which causally impact the subject’s ability to process evidence” (Scarantino and de Sousa 2018). This is not to say that emotion has no place in reasoning—it certainly does. It can ground evaluative judgments, direct attention by establishing patterns of salience, and anchor the ends at which instrumental reasoning aims (Scarantino and de Sousa 2018). But, as with sunlight, emotion may be either illuminating or blinding.
The Benefits of Experience Greatly Exceed the Liabilities
Published in The American Journal of Bioethics, 2023
Ethan Bradley, David Wasserman
Three other biases—motivated reasoning, emotional reasoning, and availability bias—are likely to impact those with a vested interest in a debate more than disinterested participants. Again, however, they need not result in bad reasoning and can be mitigated. Participants can carefully review each other’s arguments in light of these potential biases. Availability, for example, may well be a source of bias for those who draw on intense, vivid experiences. Being autistic, one of us (E.B.) finds it helpful to illustrate arguments in disability ethics by reference to examples relating to autism. That need not be a problem, so long as he keeps in mind that his experiences are only examples that, however powerful, are not proof, and may not represent the views of other autistics. A concern about representativeness leads us to the second claimed liability in taking personal experience into account.
Why (Some) Unrealistic Optimism is Permissible in Patient Decision Making
Published in The American Journal of Bioethics, 2018
Anneli Jefferson, Lisa Bortolotti
More information should in principle make a prediction more precise. However, it also provides an entry point where individuals can apply motivated reasoning to show that they are special in ways that makes a desired outcome more likely. The biased way in which people take into account information supporting their desired outcome and discount undesirable information may well make individuals’ expectations end up being unrealistic (Kuzmanovic et al. 2015). Nevertheless, it is entirely possible that their case is indeed special, and a population-based risk assessment is by necessity too coarse-grained to take this into account. Furthermore, one of the factors affecting medical outcomes may be the optimistic beliefs themselves. This does not mean that beliefs about treatment success cannot be unrealistic (cf. Jefferson et al. 2017), but that it may be impossible to ascertain whether they are and, if so, how unrealistic they are.