Jan 30, 2024 12:02 AM
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1032643
INTRO: A shift away from the individual expert as a source of scientific knowledge and authority is proposed by researchers in a recent scholarly paper, published in the open-access peer-reviewed journal Social Psychological Bulletin.
In their paper, the team of Dr Duygu Uygun Tunç (currently with University of Chicago, USA) and PhD candidate Mehmet Necip Tunç (Tilburg University, the Netherlands) propose an “extended virtue model”, where scientific expertise is rather associated with being a “reliable source of information” on certain scientific questions, instead of credentials, such as education, affiliations, scholarly publications, awards, and grants.
This perspective allows two things: we can identify groups (rather than individuals) as the true experts, where the scientific questions can be addressed only by a collective effort; and we can evaluate expertise on the basis of actual performance rather than accolades earned in the past.
This reform, they argue, would be the key to not only appropriately credit the scientific contribution of everyone involved in a big-team discovery, but also improve self-correction, replicability, and thereby overall integrity in science.
“Scientific expertise has been a topic of controversy for several decades, since with claims to expertise come claims to intellectual authority and responsibility. Should I trust the experts when they say I should undergo a risky surgical operation, receive a newly researched drug, or that governments must take drastic measures to counter climate change,” the team explains.
How we define and justify expertise has implications for public trust in science. One aspect of the credibility of science is its capacity to self-correct. How we conceive scientific expertise has an impact on how we diagnose problems with self-correction, and how we chart the path towards solutions.
In their scholarly paper, published in the open-access peer-reviewed journal Social Psychological Bulletin, the researchers examined how the research tradition in psychology conceives scientific expertise, and how this conception hampers reform efforts to increase psychology’s self-correction capacity.
The team notes that to this day, the mainstream conception of expertise remains very individualistic, and focuses on the possession of eminent credentials or unique knowledge and skills. Instead, they point out, society and policy makers need to favour a non-individualist model, which focuses on competent and responsible epistemic performance. They also remind that large research collaborations with other scientists are becoming more and more common, especially since complex and interdisciplinary questions require multi-faceted, socially distributed cognitive tasks beyond the capacity of an individual. However, it is very difficult to credit, reward or hold accountable an expert who is not an individual in the given system of credit and incentives... (MORE - details)
INTRO: A shift away from the individual expert as a source of scientific knowledge and authority is proposed by researchers in a recent scholarly paper, published in the open-access peer-reviewed journal Social Psychological Bulletin.
In their paper, the team of Dr Duygu Uygun Tunç (currently with University of Chicago, USA) and PhD candidate Mehmet Necip Tunç (Tilburg University, the Netherlands) propose an “extended virtue model”, where scientific expertise is rather associated with being a “reliable source of information” on certain scientific questions, instead of credentials, such as education, affiliations, scholarly publications, awards, and grants.
This perspective allows two things: we can identify groups (rather than individuals) as the true experts, where the scientific questions can be addressed only by a collective effort; and we can evaluate expertise on the basis of actual performance rather than accolades earned in the past.
This reform, they argue, would be the key to not only appropriately credit the scientific contribution of everyone involved in a big-team discovery, but also improve self-correction, replicability, and thereby overall integrity in science.
“Scientific expertise has been a topic of controversy for several decades, since with claims to expertise come claims to intellectual authority and responsibility. Should I trust the experts when they say I should undergo a risky surgical operation, receive a newly researched drug, or that governments must take drastic measures to counter climate change,” the team explains.
How we define and justify expertise has implications for public trust in science. One aspect of the credibility of science is its capacity to self-correct. How we conceive scientific expertise has an impact on how we diagnose problems with self-correction, and how we chart the path towards solutions.
In their scholarly paper, published in the open-access peer-reviewed journal Social Psychological Bulletin, the researchers examined how the research tradition in psychology conceives scientific expertise, and how this conception hampers reform efforts to increase psychology’s self-correction capacity.
The team notes that to this day, the mainstream conception of expertise remains very individualistic, and focuses on the possession of eminent credentials or unique knowledge and skills. Instead, they point out, society and policy makers need to favour a non-individualist model, which focuses on competent and responsible epistemic performance. They also remind that large research collaborations with other scientists are becoming more and more common, especially since complex and interdisciplinary questions require multi-faceted, socially distributed cognitive tasks beyond the capacity of an individual. However, it is very difficult to credit, reward or hold accountable an expert who is not an individual in the given system of credit and incentives... (MORE - details)