ArticleReview of philosophy and psychology2016
Explanatory Judgment, Moral Offense and Value-Free Science.
Article in Review of philosophy and psychology, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Causes of reporting bias: a theoretical framework.F1000Research · 2019Pooled it
- Thickness Is More Than Affective Valence: Evaluative Language Through the Lenses of Psycholinguistics.Cognitive science · 2026Article
- Article
- The (im-)moral scientist? Measurement and framing effects shape the association between scientists and immorality.PloS one · 2022Article
- Article
- Not All Skepticism Is Equal: Exploring the Ideological Antecedents of Science Acceptance and Rejection.Personality & social psychology bulletin · 2018Article
- Determinants of Judgments of Explanatory Power: Credibility, Generality, and Statistical Relevance.Frontiers in psychology · 2017Article
- The Learning Styles Myth is Thriving in Higher Education.Frontiers in psychology · 2015Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
A popular view in philosophy of science contends that scientific reasoning is objective to the extent that the appraisal of scientific hypotheses is not influenced by moral, political, economic, or social values, but only by the available evidence. A large body of results in the psychology of motivated-reasoning has put pressure on the empirical adequacy of this view. The present study extends this body of results by providing direct evidence that the moral offensiveness of a scientific hypothesis biases explanatory judgment along several dimensions, even when prior credence in the hypothesis is controlled for. Furthermore, it is shown that this bias is insensitive to an economic incentive to be accurate in the evaluation of the evidence. These results contribute to call into question the attainability of the ideal of a value-free science.
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.