Objectivity and Bias – Metaphors in Science

Objectivity is a Myth

Objectivity is a myth. Situated perspectives—contextual factors—shape the way we do and communicate research. This isn’t a bad thing. On the contrary, it’s essential. New knowledge comes about not just because researchers follow highly routinized protocols, but because they do so in the context of intuition, hunches, and ideas and interests informed by their personal perspectives. Most researchers also choose to research things that matter to them in some way, such that our personal interests help motivate and inspire our research agendas.

Communicating science rigorously requires recognizing and accounting for your perspective, not trying to get rid of it. Believing that it doesn’t matter means that you’re not recognizing your perspective, not that you don’t have one.

If that’s the case, then why do we hear so much talk about being objective and avoiding bias? Even though objectivity is impossible because humans can never just set aside their perspectives, the same word, “objectivity,” is also used to describe adhering to the norms of a particular community.

Following this meaning of the word, taking an “objective view” means taking a view with which other reasonable members of your society would agree, that adheres to widely shared social norms about how to describe things, and that avoids using language that aligns with some subgroups against others. Journalistic objectivity and scientific objectivity are two special cases.

Journalistic objectivity entails presenting reasonable perspectives on a topic or issue, in line with available evidence, without showing preference to any one perspective for personal reasons. For example, an objective news article about a climate protest will aim to describe that protest in a way that would be recognized as accurate by anyone who witnessed it, irrespective of which side they’re on. Nonetheless, the way those facts are conveyed will still be shaped by the journalist’s perspective and the norms of the newspaper that employs them: who they thought was important to interview, where they were physically standing at the protest, specific words they chose to use, etc.

Scientific objectivity similarly entails adhering to your scientific community’s norms for generating and interpreting data. For example, an objective conclusion to a research article summarizes what the research means for further research and suggests likely broader implications, but only in a way that experts in that discipline would generally agree is reasonable in light of the results of the paper.

But what’s reasonable? Here’s where things get sticky. All societies have explicit and implicit norms for judging what is true and false, factual and actual or fantastical and made up. In some contexts, it may be reasonable to state as a fact that an ancestor or a saint spoke to you in a dream. In others, that same statement may be treated as something that you only imagined, and strong commitment to it may lead others to think that you’re suffering from a delusion or mental illness. To further complicate matters, many of us participate in and need to communicate with multiple societies that may have different norms.

It’s a major broach of collective norms and values to accept statements as true that don’t adhere to well-established social conventions for establishing truth. We can confidently declare false Trump’s assertion that the 2020 election was “stolen” when zero available evidence supports his claim of widespread fraudulent voting. There is no question that Trump’s statements are false and unreasonable, even if we also accept that the particularities of how truths are evaluated differ across times and places. Acknowledging that knowledge is socially constructed doesn’t mean that anything goes.

However, knowledge is often uncertain, so the line between reasonable and unreasonable is not always clear-cut. In climate change conversations, evolution in public discourse and the publicly available scientific evidence means that, during the lifetimes of people who are still actively writing about the topic, it has sometimes been reasonable to say that the link between burning fossil fuels and global warming is uncertain. As available evidence and discussion of that evidence has changed, that same statement has become unreasonable. Today, in 2024, some scientists, journalists, and politicians might say that it is reasonable to describe hydrogen as a potentially carbon-friendly energy solution, even as other members of those groups would say that hydrogen is obviously linked to ongoing carbon emissions so that calling it sustainable is unreasonable. In several years, norms around that debate will probably have changed.

Here’s an explanation of how The Guardian, a British newspaper, decided to revise their style guide for articles about climate 2019, in response to how both scientific evidence and public norms for discussing it had changed: “It’s a crisis, not a change; the six Guardian language changes on climate matters.”

Bias

If you sew or enjoy fashion or costume design, you may know that cutting fabric on the bias means cutting at a 45 degree angle to the direction of the warp and weft threads. Fabric is usually cut with the grain—cuts are made parallel to the direction of the threads so that the cut bit of fabric hangs straight without twisting. Cutting on the bias is the exception to that general rule, used in special cases when you want fabric to twist so that it drapes close to the body—a clingy evening gown, for example.

The red arrow indicates a cut “on the bias.”

Thinking about fabric is useful for understanding bias in communication, because to identify bias we must first identify what straight up-and-down looks like; you can only know what “bias” means if you can identify “going with the grain.” In this metaphor, straight up-and-down are the community norms for the level-headed, straight-shooting, even-keeled way of approaching a topic. American English has a lot of idioms to describe looking things straight versus at a slant. The important thing to recognize is that we’re talking about the fabric of society, and that the grain of our shared social fabric can change over time.

Historically, scientific institutions have encouraged ignoring the grain altogether, imagining that science is somehow separate from the fabric of society. While some scientists still do, that, too, is a community norm in the midst of changing.

Further reading

On understanding journalistic objectivity when so much of the news is politically polarized, check out this NPR podcast about reporting on Black Lives Matter.
On the history of journalistic objectivity and how it has been used to exclude marginalized voices, check out The View from Somewhere by Lewis Raven Wallace.
For a review on how philosophers have understood scientific objectivity, check out this Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article.