When scientific publications are meant to justify political choices
Do you remember? It was barely 20 years ago. All the media echoed alarmist American research supposed to demonstrate that the violent images our children saw on screens made most of them violent! And today? Well, you would be hard pressed to find any echo of this concern in the media. In the meantime, those famous studies that frightened generations of parents have all been invalidated for lack of scientific rigour.
But there is something more serious. These American studies that pointed to the role of video games in the violence of some teenagers never questioned the role played by the omnipresence of firearms, nor the encouraged practice of hunting live animals among minors. And for good reason! This question is almost forbidden by the American constitution! By totally ignoring certain parameters that organise the society studied, such studies present themselves as “scientifically” valid when they relate to the state of a given society, and therefore tend to justify its a priori assumptions as soon as they do not question them.
Here is another example. A recent article that I was asked to review denounced the consequences of what the authors called “pseudo pornography” on young people. The article, written by a Chinese team, showed, with figures to back it up, that watching short videos online of young women dressed in tight clothes and short skirts encouraged young adults to masturbate, which contributed to reducing their academic or professional performance. The general idea of the article was therefore that this “pseudo pornography” should be banned in the same way as pornography already is in China. The problem is that in this article, the behaviours studied were examined without ever taking into account the massive sexual repression weighing on young Chinese people. Indeed, in that country, everything that touches closely or remotely on sexuality is taboo. Most young Chinese people have no sex education at all, and some parents even forbid their children any romantic relationship before the age of 22 or 23.
The reactivity to videos that would be harmless in another country is therefore directly dependent on the state of chronic frustration of young Chinese adults, condemned to find no other expression for their emotions and their sexuality than masturbation. The conclusion is that limiting to a single country a study on a subject as dependent on social organisation as sexuality condemns it to biased results. To be valid, such a study would have to cross-check its results with those of countries that organise sex education differently. It is not the videos in question that are responsible for the change in young adults’ heart and breathing rates, and in their masturbatory practices, it is their impact on a population deprived of any sexual and even romantic life!
These two examples raise one and the same problem: the way in which certain scientific publications examine a malaise solely from the point of view of the criteria that the authorities in place allow to be questioned runs the risk of making us forget the impact of political and social organisation on the results measured.
So, shouldn’t researchers in the human sciences indicate, in each of their publications, the impossibility they faced in taking certain parameters into account because of their country’s political choices? It would oblige them to question how their mental functioning depends on the habits and rules of the society in which they live. And it would prevent scientific research from being instrumentalised in the service of values that are never clearly named, turning some publications into tools meant to endorse political choices without ever saying so explicitly.
S.T.
