ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2023
Prosocial motives underlie scientific censorship by scientists: A perspective and research agenda.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 19 papers.
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Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed.
- Refining the role of behavioural and social sciences in pandemic response post-COVID-19.Nature human behaviour · 2026Review
- Recursive mentalizing and public salience in the perception of common knowledge.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Article
- Students' motives for restricting academic freedom: Viewpoint discrimination and prosocial concerns.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- The Dark Side of Moral Conviction-Integrating Political Psychology, Cognitive Science, and Neuroscience.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2025Article
- Speech Repression and Threat Narratives in Politics: Social Goals and Cognitive Foundations.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2025Review
- Morally offensive scientific findings activate cognitive chicanery.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2025Article
- Should governments moralize health?Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2025Article
- Taboos and Self-Censorship Among U.S. Psychology Professors.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2025Article
- An agenda for science communication research and practice.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- The importance of scientists' intellectual humility for communicating effectively across ideological and identity-based divides.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Towards an estimate of the impact of censorship on biomedical literature.Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA · 2025Article
- Motivations to connect with like-minded audiences increase partisan sharing on social media.PNAS nexus · 2025Article
- Adversarial testing of global neuronal workspace and integrated information theories of consciousness.Nature · 2025Article
- A science of consciousness beyond pseudo-science and pseudo-consciousness.Nature neuroscience · 2025Article
- Matthew 7:3-a response to Kingsland and Taiz (2024).Protoplasma · 2025Article
- Conflicts of Interest in Nutrition: Categorical Thinking and the Stigma of Commercial Collaboration.Current developments in nutrition · 2024Article
- Reply to Darlow and Gray: Censorship is exclusion.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Censorship or inclusion?Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
39 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Science is among humanity's greatest achievements, yet scientific censorship is rarely studied empirically. We explore the social, psychological, and institutional causes and consequences of scientific censorship (defined as actions aimed at obstructing particular scientific ideas from reaching an audience for reasons other than low scientific quality). Popular narratives suggest that scientific censorship is driven by authoritarian officials with dark motives, such as dogmatism and intolerance. 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. This perspective helps explain both recent findings on scientific censorship and recent changes to scientific institutions, such as the use of harm-based criteria to evaluate research. We discuss unknowns surrounding the consequences of censorship and provide recommendations for improving transparency and accountability in scientific decision-making to enable the exploration of these unknowns. The benefits of censorship may sometimes outweigh costs. However, until costs and benefits are examined empirically, scholars on opposing sides of ongoing debates are left to quarrel based on competing values, assumptions, and intuitions.
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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.