The PSychological Foundations Of Culture Mark Schaller

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.Within scientific disciplines inwhich acceptance rates at even the best journals are fairly high (e.g., theo-retical physics), the anti-innovation bias may not exist at all.However,within scientific disciplines in which acceptance rates are quite low (e.g.,psychology), the individual-level anti-innovation bias may slow the rate atwhich new and unusual ideas become part of the cultural knowledge.Given these sorts of institutionalized anti-innovation bias that canemerge within a science, it often takes a special individual effort to sneak in-novative work into the public realm of scientific knowledge.One inspiringexample is offered by the actions of Robert MacArthur, a theoretical biolo-gist who made hugely inventive contributions to ecology and population bi-TLFeBOOK214 CRANDALL AND SCHALLERology from the 1950s to the 1970s.MacArthur deliberately bypassed theconservative review process at the usual journals and instead publishedmuch of his most innovative work in the Proceedings of the National Acad-emy of Sciences a publication that once had the enlightened view that anyidea that impressed one intelligent scientist.was worthy of publication(Fretwell, 1975, p.4).MacArthur also was instrumental in founding a mono-graph series and a journal (Journal of Theoretical Population Biology) toserve as outlets for the sort of conceptually innovative research that hechampioned.HOW INDIVIDUAL NEEDS AND GOALS SHAPECULTURAL TRANSMISSION OF SCIENTIFICKNOWLEDGEPublication is one necessary step in the process whereby some bit of pri-vately held scientific knowledge becomes part of the scientific culture, butit is hardly sufficient.In order for knowledge to become truly cultural, itmust be noticed and learned by other scientists.As an indicator of impacton scientific cultural knowledge, publication of information is almost use-less; far more indicative is the extent to which that information is cited byother scientists.If one uses citations in any scientific discipline as a stan-dard of impact, it s clear that most published scientific work has little or noreal impact on the cultural knowledge of that discipline (Cole & Cole, 1973;Menard, 1971).Within psychology, for instance, only 10% of those psycholo-gists who publish are cited even once a year (Garvey, 1979). In the face offigures such as these, wrote Hull (1988, p.360), it is difficult not to con-clude that publishing a paper is roughly equivalent to throwing it away.Ideally, of course, that small percent of a scientific literature that gets no-ticed represents the best work in the discipline.To some extent, this issurely true.On average, conceptually useful and empirically convincingwork is almost certainly more likely to be cited than shoddy derivativework.But scientific goodness is clearly not the only thing that determineswhether published scientific work becomes part of cultural knowledge ornot.All sorts of nonscientific variables play roles as well, including suchseeming trivial factors as punctuation used in titles (Whissel, 1999).Psychological processes predicated on self-serving motives and goalsalso influence scientists tendency to cite other scientists work.Greenwaldand Schuh (1995) found an ethnic bias in scientific citations: Authors withtypically Jewish names showed a bias toward citing the work of others withJewish names, whereas those with non-Jewish names showed a bias towardciting the work of others with non-Jewish names.This ethnic bias in scien-tific citation suggests that egocentric motives and goals that have diverseTLFeBOOK9.INDIVIDUAL GOALS AND THE CULTURE OF SCIENCE 215consequences in ordinary social life also have subtle influences on the ac-cumulation of a body of culturally shared scientific knowledge.Just as self-serving goals have an influence, so too epistemic goals mayalso influence which scientific products do and do not become part of cul-tural knowledge.Although scientists probably engage in complex multidi-mensional thinking more often than the typical layperson, scientists cannotescape the human desire for cognitive simplicity and efficiency.Conse-quently, published work that is more quickly apprehended and easily un-derstood is likely to be better remembered.Perhaps even more importantthan ease of understanding is the ease of communicating the relevant scien-tific information.Interpersonal communication is essential to the emer-gence of culturally shared knowledge (Latan�, 1996), so only knowledgethat is easily transmitted from one individual to another is likely to becomepart of a cultural knowledge base (Dawkins, 1989; Schaller & Conway, 2001;Sperber, 1990).This is evident in the transmission of rumors, in which diffi-cult-to-convey details often disappear, or are changed over the course ofmultiple instances of interpersonal communication.It is evident too in thepersistence and change of stereotypic beliefs over time (Kashima, 2000;Schaller, Conway, & Tanchuk, in press).Might it also be the case in thetransmission and persistence of published scientific knowledge?Several different lines of empirical evidence suggest that it does.Theselines of research reveal two distinct mechanisms through which individualepistemic motives can influence the cultural transmission of scientificknowledge.Each mechanism corresponds to a part of the broader evolu-tionary process that underlies culture change in general, and scientificprogress in particular (Dawkins, 1989; Hull, 1988) [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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