Divided loyalties and the responsibility of social scientists.

• Author: Fish, Jefferson M.

A scientist's first responsibility is to tell the truth. This includes telling unpleasant or unpopular truths and standing firm against pressure to present findings in a partial or distorted way. Social scientists' loyalties to groups with a variety of agendas conflict with this basic responsibility. The vulnerability of minority and disadvantaged groups in particular leads them to demand allegiance over candor from social scientists who are members of those groups and who may even ethnocentrically identify with this demand. Social scientists with cross-cultural experience have an advantage in viewing their own group more objectively and in resisting its attempts to undermine their commitment to the truth. Those who cooperate with efforts by government and others to limit the scope of research and to destroy data have compromised their commitment to the truth.

Telling the truth is more difficult in the social sciences than in other fields because the investigator lives in a social world and is usually involved to a greater or lesser extent in the phenomena being studied. This involvement entails the complications produced by egocentrism and ethnocentrism.

It is not that astrophysicists or microbiologists are uninfluenced by sociocultural factors in the questions they ask, the kinds of data they collect, or their interpretations of observations. The point is that they are not a part of the distant galaxies or microorganisms they observe in the ways that social scientists are a part of the social and cultural phenomena that interest them.

Egocentrism is a psychological phenomenon: we cannot observe certain things about ourselves and our relationships with others because we are doing the observing. When a man growls, "I am not angry," egocentrism prevents his recognizing the emotion that is obvious to others. For example, he cannot see the expression on his face. Egocentrism has advantages: self-preservation, making it easier for us to act in our own best interest, as well as self-protection and self-enhancement, enabling us to see ourselves more positively than an objective view might warrant. Although individuals differ in self-awareness and people can improve with training, egocentrism has the disadvantage of limiting the degree to which we can see ourselves as others see us. It can lead to negative relations with others, from deceiving oneself to preening to bullying. Ethnocentrism is a cultural phenomenon that parallels egocentrism. People grow up in social groups, and they learn to see the world from those groups' perspectives. For example, Americans learning Spanish or French often have difficulty with the subjunctive because expressing thoughts in English does not require us to make certain distinctions of meaning that are built into Romance languages. Ethnocentrism has many advantages: it is the glue that holds groups together, that enables people to distinguish us from them, and that leads individuals to act against their own self-interest and even to die for the betterment or survival of the group. Ethnocentrism, like egocentrism, however, distorts reality and places a limit on the extent to which it is possible to observe one's own group or others accurately--not to mention its well-known role in the maltreatment of outsiders, from snubbing to genocide.

Ethnocentrism is pervasive. We think (ethnocentrically) that we live in a physical world of things--and this world does exist--it is a good idea, for example, to get back on the curb to avoid an oncoming car--but we also live in a world of cultural concepts. Some people on the planet still have never seen a car, and they would be baffled if they came across one. Even the "I am not angry" example assumes that all participants are American (or from a related culture). Display rules for emotions, especially for anger, and for making self-referential statements about feelings vary across cultures.

A cultural misunderstanding occurs when the same behavior has different meanings in different cultures. A French man accidentally bumps into a woman on the New York subway and says nothing. She concludes that he is rude--he should have said "excuse me." An American man accidentally bumps into a woman on the Paris Metro and says, "Excusez-moi." She concludes that he is rude--he should have respected her privacy and left her alone. It is bad enough that he bumped into her; now he is trying to pick her up! Silence or saying "excuse me" in situations such as the one described has meaning in both France and the United States, but the meanings are different (Carroll 1988). Because all parties are ethnocentric, they act as their cultures have taught them to act and (mis)interpret the other's behavior. They assign the only meaning they know or can imagine to the apology or silence because that is the only meaning that exists in their cultural world. The more two cultural worlds differ and the more ethnocentric the actors, the more the world of the other seems odd, strange, ugly, disgusting, or just plain wrong--worthy of moral rejection on grounds of the "yuck factor."

Social scientists know all this. They know that it is impossible to overcome ethnocentrism completely, but also that they have to do their best to limit its effects and to remain aware of its influence. One way to do so is by acquiring cross-cultural experience. For example, there used to be a requirement for sociocultural anthropologists to do fieldwork in another culture for at least a year and to learn the local language (or dialect of English). This requirement is no longer in effect--monolingual English-speaking Americans can get a Ph.D. degree in anthropology by studying other monolingual English-speaking Americans. As with the disappearance of the requirement for competency in foreign languages in doctoral programs in various fields, this change is symptomatic of the growing ethnocentrism of the social sciences.

The point of acquiring cross-cultural experience is that it makes one bicultural-one learns, however imperfectly, to see the world through the eyes of those in another culture. One also gets a sense, despite the limitations of ethnocentrism, of how we appear to them. Once one has an articulated awareness of two very different ways of understanding the world--including two different sets of meanings and values often applied to the same objects, events, and behavior--it is easy to see that thousands of different ways might exist. And they do.

A person can become fascinated by human behavior and decide to become a social scientist for many different reasons. Prominent among these reasons is a desire to understand oneself and others both as individuals and as members of groups. Along with this motivation often comes a concern with issues of inequality and social justice.

For the first 190,000 years of the 200,000-year existence of anatomically modern humans, we lived a remarkably egalitarian existence in small kin-related bands of a few dozen hunter-gatherers. When you are on the move, you do not accumulate many things to distribute unequally; and face-to-face relationships with people you have known all your life tend to limit the arbitrary exercise of power. In the end, the group can always kill or eject someone who becomes too self-aggrandizing, or subgroups can split off and go their own way for any reason that seems sufficient to them.

Once humans began to plant food crops, which kept them in one place and sustained larger populations, slavery and other forms of extreme inequality became prominent, and they have remained so to the present day. Even in the United States, which is so rich that many of our poor people are obese (whereas malnutrition and starvation are more often the norm elsewhere), we see the contrast between a few multibillionaires and hundreds of thousands of homeless people.

Social scientists can hardly avoid issues of inequality and social justice. Furthermore, many have personally experienced discrimination or belong to groups that have been mistreated. Because we are all members of multiple groups, most people, including most social scientists, fall into one or more categories that have gotten a raw deal. Half the population are women; and many cultural, linguistic, "racial," social class, and other classifications occupy positions below the top of the food chain. Few individuals in the general population or among social scientists are at the top of every hierarchy--that is, upper-class, white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant males. Even the latter individuals, because of their rarity, may at one time or another feel marginalized or...