There’s No Way I’m Publishing That!

Source: Okmarian/Pixabay

So picture this: You are a behavioral science researcher at a top state university and your team has, for more than a year, been experimentally studying the efficacy of online versus in-person college education. Using an intensive and highly validated experimental methodology, studying more than 10,000 college students across more than 40 different universities, you find something that is shocking: You find that, controlling for a broad array of factors (e.g., different instructors, content areas, kinds of universities, etc.), students who are randomly assigned to the in-person-schooling condition perform worse on various objective indices of academic aptitude (such as the Graduate Record Exam) and on traditional markers of academic success (e.g., graduation rates) than participants who are randomly assigned to the online-only condition.

You and your team are, of course, dumbfounded. This pattern was definitely not consistent with your prediction based on your hypothesis.

Further, this finding is kind of threatening. You have taught exclusively in-person at this same university for more than a quarter of a century and you (along with most of your colleagues and administrators) have always believed quite genuinely and strongly in the traditional (non-online) collegiate experience. Your new results seem to fly fully in the face of that vision. Uggh!

You call a meeting with the whole research squad and, after double checking all your data carefully, you realize that there is no chance that you are mis-reading the data. You call for a full replication of the study. Over the next 18 months, your team replicates the study as carefully as possible.

When it comes time to analyze the data, the air in the room is so thick that it can be cut with a butter knife. With your full team present, you run the basic analyses and, much to the shock of you and your team, the findings from your first study replicated quite clearly: You have provided strong evidence that online education is ultimately superior* to in-person education—in spite of the fact that you predicted quite the opposite and that your entire career has been dedicated to the traditional, in-person collegiate experience.

What do you do now!?!?!?

Self-Censorship and Science

In a recent article that I feel quite fortunate to have been part of, Clark et al. (2023) provide evidence and analysis suggesting that there is actually an awful lot of censorship going on when it comes to modern research within the academy—including in psychological science. This analysis, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, makes an important distinction between “hard” versus “soft” censorship. Hard censorship is the kind that we tend to think about most readily. When the state of Tennessee tried to disallow the teaching of natural selection (see Szasz, 1969), the censorship at hand was obvious. We can think of this kind of censorship as “hard” censorship.

But based on the work of Clark et al. (2023), it seems to be the case that, under modern conditions, a sort of “soft” censorship is becoming normative. This soft censorship, which is generally benign on the surface, takes a much more subtle form. In fact, soft censorship quite often includes what we might call “self-censorship”—the tendency for a scholar to intentionally withhold information that they have uncovered for any number of reasons—with these reasons often having a self-protective or other-protective function.

As Clark et al. (2023) write:

“Our analysis suggests that scientific censorship is often driven by scientists, who are primarily motivated by self-protection, benevolence toward peer scholars, and prosocial concerns for the well-being of human social groups.”

Examples of Four Types of Self-Censorship

Among the kinds of soft, self-censorship that Clark et al. (2023) refer to, four stand out as both common and (at least on the surface) understandable. Here, I define each of these and give examples based on the hypothetical scenario presented at the start of this article.

1. Self-protection is perhaps the most common form of self-censorship. And its meaning is self-evident. It takes place when a researcher withholds information in the interest of covering one’s own interests (CYI!). Essentially, this kind of self-censorship would take place when someone withholds information in an effort to not make waves and to ensure their own job security.

With the hypothetical example above, this might look like the researcher choosing to not write and publish a report on the findings regarding the superiority of online education in an effort to help maintain their own job and, even more broadly, the character of the industry that they are dedicated to. Kind of like: Dang, if I publish this, I could find myself out of a job—along with, potentially, thousands and thousands of others!

2. Self-enhancement is the general social psychological tendency to try to raise one’s own reputation or status. One can easily imagine how unpopular it might be in a traditional university community to be the person who discovered that a standard university education is essentially sub-par. In short, no one wants to be that guy! Perhaps holding onto the findings, then, might be done out of an effort to maintain one’s status within their community.

3. The principle of benevolence, in this context, speaks to “…protect(ing) the target of censorship from negative consequences” (Clark et al., 2023). So this particular form of self-censorship is done for the benefit of others. Perhaps you are so incredibly wedded to the idea that a standard education is superior that you actually refuse to believe your own data. And in the interest of the futures and lives of the many young adults that you work with (now and in the future), you hold off on publishing the actual data with what you believe are the students’ actual interests in mind.

4. Prosocial self-censorship is a related form of self-censorship characterized by an attempt to protect third parties from the content. Imagine that your university recently hired a new vice president of in-person educational experiences—named Billy—and you happen to be good friends with Billy. You have coffee together regularly, play pickleball together on Saturdays, and text each other silly memes pretty much every day. You even helped them and their whole family move into their new house near the university (3,000 miles from their old university on the other coast). Gosh, you may think to yourself, my research findings pretty much make Billy’s job fully obsolete—I don’t want to do that—if Billy loses their job, I’ll be out a good friend and pickleball partner. I think I’ll just shove the findings in the proverbial file drawer and call it a day.

Bottom Line

While the research about in-person versus online education presented here is fully hypothetical, there are, in fact, many research findings and topics that researchers treat with the kind of self-censorship presented here. In a recent study of self-censorship within the academy, a full 91% of researchers reported that they were at least somewhat likely to self-censor when it came to presenting academic ideas across a broad array of contexts (see Honeycutt et al., 2022).

As described above, such self-censorship is, interestingly, motivated out of prosocial reasons. This said, from the perspective of a pure academic, as we point out in our paper (Clark et al., 2023), such self-censorship is, especially in the long-term, quite problematic. It has the often-unwitting effect of stifling or even covering up the truth.

And if we, as behavioral scientists, are interested in knowing what humans are truly like—in what truly makes us tick—censoring significant findings and topics that bear on the broader human experience has the potential to stifle our understanding of who we are. To my mind, this outcome seems problematic for a plethora of reasons.

In terms of solutions to this issue, I have to say that I’m not quite fully sure. But putting the issue out there clearly and carefully, hopefully, will have the capacity to move the needle a bit. I sure hope that this is the case—our understanding of human nature is at stake.

*NOTE: This example is completely hypothetical and is only being used here as a thought exercise. The author is a huge fan of the in-person, traditional collegiate experience!