By Barış Bayram
Why is it hard to recognise the full value of a new idea, research finding or other innovation? Why do people fail to properly appreciate other people or things most of the time? Can this help explain why injustices persist?
There is no “invisible hand” that allocates rewards according to capabilities or performance, including ensuring that academic research or social interactions are recognised in terms of scientific or ethical merits.
There are three main patterns causing what I call “unjust appreciation”:
- lack of intellectual development to determine values, merits and deserts (ie., just rewards)
- cognitive biases and social biases, especially related to status and groups
- tribalism, along with power and conflict considerations that rely on cost-benefit analysis.
These patterns are often unconscious and primarily stem from our desire to avert social, existential and cognitive costs. Such costs for yourself are incurred whenever it is “better” to appreciate, use or generate a research tool (which could be a rule, theory, concept, situation, action, idea, policy or capability) that is incompatible with those you used previously.
Therefore, when you appreciate such an incompatible research tool, you will lose some of your important previous investments, theoretical grounds and rewards. Further you may need to correct past unjust appreciations in accordance with the new knowledge.
Such cost-aversions facilitate and are facilitated by motivated reasoning, confirmation bias and unethical power relations. They also maintain the status quo leading to selecting, valuing, promoting and rewarding agents, theories, capabilities or performances that are in line with existing social status and power relations. “Unjust appreciation” can therefore support, rationalise and generate injustice and untruths that are promulgated by higher status, powerful agents in any social network.
For example, a new model or other research innovation is more likely to be underappreciated if it is:
- offered by a low status and/or “disliked” researcher
- incompatible with an important theoretical tool used by high status researchers to corroborate their own academic work.
Consequently, “unjust appreciation” as a means of unjust punishment can hinder any critically useful possibilities of research innovation on complex problems because higher status agents seek to conserve and justify the merits of their work and their position.
Why is this important for researchers tackling complex societal and environmental problems?
Failure to appreciate these patterns underpinning “unjust appreciation” means that research on complex problems may be ineffective, or even worse, may perpetuate injustices. There are three key issues to be aware of:
- researchers are prone to the cost-aversions described above, which may influence the topics they choose to work on or the approaches taken to the topics
- even if individual researchers are attuned to avoiding these cost-aversions in their own work, the broader research community may be disposed to “unjust appreciation”
- public policy makers, commercial interests and others in a position to act on research findings may be motivated to maintain an unjust status quo.
In countries with authoritarian regimes, and even democracies, there is a considerable risk that researchers might avoid any challenging implications for the status quo, especially in relation to their government’s expectations, be they implicit or explicit.
Questioning ourselves about lack of intellectual autonomy, ethical credit-assignment and motivations
Although my theoretical model leads to a pessimistic interpretation of the current rules and dynamics of how to reward in any realm of the status quo, high-quality awareness of such problematic aspects could motivate us to optimistically innovate and realize alternative sociocultural patterns toward transformational change in terms of ethical improvements. This requires us to deliberately understand real interests in: (a) further realizations of justice and (b) value optimization where the world benefits most from what is actually and/or potentially valuable.
How can we ensure that, as individuals and tribes, researchers rapidly overcome our own aversion to publicly criticize and challenge past and present untruths, injustices and unethicalities, both in the research that we conduct and in the societies we work in?
I suggest the following are key:
- stay alert to and avoid sociocultural patterns that support, rationalise and generate injustice
- invest in debiasing, ie., develop rules and capabilities to counter cognitive and social biases associated with “unjust appreciation”
- frame “just appreciation” as the principal means of achieving better research innovation and social utility, and improve feedback and appreciation patterns in order to be able to globally catalyze a sociocultural shift in ethical directions.
What ideas do you have for avoiding an aversion in research to publicly criticizing and challenging past and present untruths, injustices and unethicalities? Do you have examples to share of “just appreciation” achieving better research outcomes?
To find out more:
Bayram, B. (2017). How to construct empirically verifiable ethics to fix the status quo. (Online): http://impakter.com/impakter-essay-construct-empirically-verifiable-ethics-fix-status-quo/
Bayram, B. (2018). Real merits and talent for progress, social justice and the Global Goals. (Online): https://www.academia.edu/35732323/Real_Merits_and_Talent_for_Progress_Social_Justice_and_the_Global_Goals?source=swp_share
Biography: Barış Bayram is an independent researcher in Istanbul, Turkey. His research interests include metaethics, complexity theory, decision science, social networks, behavioral economics, psychology, human rights and transdisciplinarity. Since 2015 his research has focused on modelling to improve systems toward realizing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.
Thank you for calling this out. In ‘positive’ sciences, this is pretty much the situation and difficult to even point out.
In a not exactly the same but similar line… In years, I have found that the best way to avoid reproducing power imbalances during research is diversity and inclusion. Inclusion of all relevant societal or organisational parties in research, by design, helps to minimize negative impact of the good-hearted researcher who is not aware of such power imbalances. Also, the pressure to be efficient in research is I think leading researchers towards repeating sociocultural patterns. You want to take shortcuts, include the best researchers as colleagues or informants that will help you answer the research question in the shortest time possible, in the limited time of interviews or workshops.
Many thanks for your insightful comment. I agree that even in ‘positive’ sciences such unjust appreciation problems happen. But of course as you articulated the distinction, this problem is less in ‘positive’ sciences than in other academic research realms. My theory explains it as such: insofar as both the research career and general life implications of incompatible innovations generated by other researchers increase, unjust appreciations become more likely while having germane defects in terms of ethical grounds which are unknown unknowns about ethical theories and about how the mind works. Consequently, if your research matters are more relevant to justice, ethics, causalities of the mind (behavior, biases, decisions etc.), politics, education system, academia itself, society, culture and the like, then any theoretical incompatibility in research is unjustly appreciated (over- or under-appreciated in problematic ways) much more than in ‘positive’ sciences. Yet this problem considerably affects and harms all sciences, academic disciplines and research topics even if some are less affected. There are really thousands of critical implications of my theory relevant to such unethical dynamics; some to consider are here:
1- Unfortunately most researchers have success-oriented and status-oriented mindsets which are more inclined to perpetuate injustices since they have to be theoretically compatible with and socially conforming to the powerful researchers in their own target research networks that strictly demand such compatibility and conformity directions in research processes and even in other sociocultural relations relevant to any real-world situation. So, the prioritization of status gains is one of the main problematic factors.
2- Such problems do not stem from political ideologies or governments. Indeed politically motivated wrongs/exclusions too are a part of this problem, but even those political determinants are generated by deeper problematic factors that I mentioned in my piece. So, I criticize individual researchers themselves and hence research organizations and employers and even the readers and other research consumers and also current education and academia systems that exclude better research/researchers, I do not criticize politics and governments as the real problematic ‘perpetrators’ so much (as a proportionality rule).
3- The underlying pattern of the root causes of such research interactions is to unjustly appreciate theoretical incompatibilities and real-world occurrences implying incompatible truths. Thus insofar as one is status-oriented, one consciously/unconsciously participates in employing unjust appreciation tools and also tries to be theoretically compatible with their own intellectual tribes. So, I think that Thomas Kuhn and related theories about the paradigm shifts too are false and misleading about research directions.
4- The conception of diversity and inclusion is a great idea. Such official programs have been mainstream more and more especially for 10 years as I see globally. Unfortunately we see that the diversity and inclusion approach is so insufficient to effectively handle such deep problems of research ethics. Because researchers who support diversity and inclusion too are doing the same unethicalities when they encounter incompatible research or a black swan event like a great researcher having no academic career or seeming a complete failure based on current education systems. So, it’s almost irrelevant, according to my theory, especially when outside ‘positive’ sciences.
As I explained the different causalities in my article (this too is incompatible with so many dominant researchers’ work), a diversity and inclusion approach is necessary but highly insufficient. So, the problems continue and even grow for many researchers somewhere. Because the matter is not only about the exclusion of members of ‘some’ groups (by members of other groups). Rather, it’s who or which research is theoretically incompatible and successfully challenges others, and whether such others are capable of understanding/evaluating such incompatible/divergent research/researchers and have related ethical developments to appreciate those research/researchers as they deserve.
As a result, since I created my original theoretical innovations, I have always offered such debiasing about relevant matters and their implications and new ethical theories in order for researchers to acquire. All of these require researchers to question and challenge divergently their own directions, theories and assumptions on relevant issues, and explore new ones. So, there would be a need for divergent intellectual developments (at least very different from current academic establishments and the research status quo). Towards such a purpose, I recommend ‘different’ papers/books that I deliberately chose in order for any researcher to build such divergent knowledge as an autodidact, even if the researcher is 20 or 80 years old, and no matter how low/high status. Whereas my solution to current problems has a bottom-up style, it’s also possible to use my theoretical innovations in organizational settings, which would be helpful too.
Kind regards,
Barış
Thank you for sharing this important reflection. I believe that it is important to look at academic protocols with a critical eye and acknowledge the history of colonialism and eurocentrism that underpins most of the institutions where research is conducted. This will offer broader insights to transform institutions and practices towards “just appreciations”.
I thank you, Gabriela Alonso, for your positive comment. Much appreciated! Agree on acknowledging the problematic effects in relation to the history of colonialism and eurocentrism. To me, such acknowledgements too are always a sort of ethical necessity to realize various issues of justice since they require the unjustly advantaged ones to not avert the avoidable displeasing costs as they are, in fact, fundamental components of real-world solutions. Also, very glad to hear that my reflection could contribute to the insights to transform institutions and practices (not only but especially the academic ones) towards “just appreciations”.
Kind regards,
Barış