Justin’s Notes

Ideological Infection Feels Like Truth From the Inside

2026-07-24 · AI-generated insight

Lee McIntyre catalogs the pathologies of social science from the outside — too much theory, cherry picking, and what he calls "ideological infection," summed up in the maxim that if one knows in advance what one wants to find, one will likely find it. It reads as a warning about other people: bad actors who let politics corrupt their statistics.

Michael Inzlicht's confession supplies what McIntyre's taxonomy is missing — the phenomenology. From the inside, ideological infection doesn't feel like infection at all. It feels like being on the right side of history. Inzlicht didn't experience his p-hacking as cheating; the moral valence of his conclusions functioned as a kind of pre-verification. If the good guys already believe it, the data merely needs to catch up.

This matters for McIntyre's proposed cure. He wants social science to break with its "barbarous past" the way medicine did — by adopting rigor, replication, data sharing. But Inzlicht's testimony suggests the diagnosis of "sloppy methodology or ideological infection" gets the structure wrong. They aren't parallel failure modes; ideology is what makes sloppiness invisible to the person committing it. The degrees of freedom McIntyre worries about — the flexible definitions, the proxy concepts, the optional robustness checks — don't get exploited through deliberate fraud. They get exploited through moral permission. Each questionable choice feels not like a shortcut but like fidelity to a truth you already know.

The implication is uncomfortable for reformers: procedural fixes like preregistration and mandatory data sharing work precisely because they don't rely on researchers detecting their own bias. Inzlicht is the proof case — a researcher honest enough to confess, who still couldn't feel the corruption while it was happening. The medicine analogy McIntyre invokes cuts deeper than he lets on. Bloodletting physicians weren't villains either; they were certain they were healing. The barbarous past wasn't populated by people who knew they were barbarous. Reform that waits for researchers to feel their bias will wait forever — the whole problem is that conviction and evidence are indistinguishable from the first-person view.

Woven from these notes

When so many studies fail to be replicated, or draw different conclusions from the same set of facts, it does not instill confidence in the social sciences. Whether this is because of sloppy methodology, ideological infection, or other problems, the result is that even if there are right and wrong answers to many of our questions about human action, most social scientists are not yet in a position to find them. It is not that none of the work in social science is rigorous enough, but when policymakers (and sometimes even other researchers) are not sure which results are reliable, it drives down the status of the entire field. If medicine could break with its barbarous past, isn’t the same path open to the social sciences? For years, many have argued that if they could emulate the “scientific method” of the natural sciences, they too could become more scientific. But this simple advice faces several problems. Among the issues that plague contemporary social scientific research: Too much theory: A number of social scientific studies propose answers that have not been tested against evidence. The classic example here is neoclassical economics, where a number of simplifying assumptions — perfect rationality, perfect information — resulted in beautiful quantitative models that had little to do with actual human behavior. Lack of experimentation/data: Except for social psychology and the newly emerging field of behavioral economics, much of social science still does not rely on experimentation, even where it is possible. For example, it is sometimes offered as justification for putting sex offenders on a public database that doing so reduces the recidivism rate. This must be measured, though, against what the recidivism rate would have been absent the Sex Offender Registry Board (SORB), which is difficult to measure and has produced varying answers. This exacerbates the difficulty in (1), whereby favored theoretical explanations are accepted even when they have not been tested against any experimental evidence. Fuzzy concepts: Some social scientific studies can lead to misleading conclusions because of the use of “proxy” concepts for what one really wishes to measure. A recent example includes measuring “warmth” as a proxy for “trustworthiness,” in which researchers assumed — on the basis of studies which show that we are more likely to trust someone whom we perceive to be “on our side” — that perceptions of scientists as “cold” meant that they would be less trustworthy as well. But the two concepts may not be interchangeable. Ideological infection: This problem is rampant throughout the social sciences, especially on topics that are politically charged. Two ongoing examples are the bastardization of empirical work on the deterrence effect of capital punishment and the effectiveness of gun control on mitigating crime. If one knows in advance what one wants to find, one will likely find it. Cherry picking: The use of statistics allows multiple “degrees of freedom” to scientific researchers, but this is the most likely to be abused. In studies on immigration, for instance, a great deal of the difference between them is a result of alternative ways of counting the “costs” incurred by immigration. This is obviously also related to (4) above. If we know our conclusion, we may shop for the data to support it. Lack of data sharing: As the evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers reports in Psychology Today, there are numerous documented cases of researchers failing to share their data in psychological studies, despite a requirement from APA-sponsored journals to do so. When data were later analyzed, errors were found most commonly in the direction of the researcher’s hypothesis. Lack of replication: Psychology is undergoing a reproducibility crisis. One might validly argue that the initial finding that nearly two-thirds of psychology studies were irreproducible was overblown, but it is nonetheless shocking that most studies are not even attempted to be replicated. This can lead to difficulties, where errors can sneak through. Questionable causation: It is gospel in statistical research that “correlation does not equal causation,” yet some social scientific studies continue to highlight provocative results of questionable value. One recent sociological study, for instance, found that matriculating at a selective college was correlated with parental visitation at art museums, without explicitly suggesting that this was likely an artifact of parental income.
— Lee McIntyre To Fix the Social Sciences, Look to the “Dark Ages” of Medicine
My work was uplifting people, or so I told myself. Looking back, I suspect that feeling like I was on the right side of history was a kind of moral cover. Maybe I felt less wrong about the p-hacking because I was promoting social justice. The conclusions I drew were what the good guys already believed, after all.
— Michael Inzlicht My P-Hacking Felt Like Truth