Social Science Space

Big Questions Require Teams That Step Across Lines

Tom McLeish and Veronica Strang — Mon, 10 Aug 2015 17:34:32 +0000

Well, it worked during the war … (Source: U.S. National Archives and Records Administration)

Until the early 1900s, scholars took it for granted that they could draw on any area of knowledge to inform their thinking on the major questions of the day. Medieval polymaths such as Hildegard of Bingen (medicine, linguistics, botany, art, philosophy and music) opened the door to Victorian scholars such as Temple Chevallier (astronomy, theology and maths) and Thomas Young (medicine, physics, music and Egyptology).

In the last century, however, the emergence of multiple disciplines and the exponential development of specialist knowledge, has discouraged such carefree grazing across academic terrains. The application of free-market ideologies to the higher education sector in the 1990s has positioned academic disciplines in competition with each other for resources.

This article by Tom McLeish and Veronica Strang originally appeared at The Conversation, a Social Science Space partner site, under the title “How to value research that crosses more than one discipline”

Speed and measurable research outputs – such as the number of journal articles or books an academic publishes – are valued higher than deeper efforts to unravel less quantitative complexities. The world wants “practical” answers, and “value for money” – now. Many academics have internalized the pressure to police disciplinary boundaries, and keep their heads down and in their faculties.

Big questions require teamwork

However, two things have become very plain. Today’s big questions require a genuine integration of diverse understandings: obvious examples include environmental change, social and political conflict, the use of genetic modification in medicine or agriculture. And sharing knowledge across disciplinary boundaries has other benefits: not only providing transformational fresh thinking about complex problems, but adding creatively to the strengths of single disciplines too.

A new report, prepared by publishers Elsevier for the Higher Education Funding Council (HEFCE), has found that interdisciplinary research is increasing in intensity in the UK.

There is a new impetus for this kind of research, both by individual scholars and, increasingly, through collaborative teamwork. The “medical humanities” are bringing historians, anthropologists, and literary scholars together with neuro-scientists and psychologists to work on issues such as why and how people hear voices. Scientists collaborating with medieval historians and theologians have been inspired to re-analyse perceptions of color as well as clarifying pre-modern science history. New ways of thinking about cancer are emerging from the joint efforts of physicists and medical scientists.

But how do we know what “good” interdisciplinary research looks like? Academics and those seeking to evaluate their work are hampered by a century of fragmentation and a lack of criteria with which to answer this question. The Research Excellence Framework (REF) continues to assess the outputs of research, such as journal articles, according to disciplinary categories.

Another recent report from the HEFCE showed that interdisciplinary research is now the major basis of required case studies used to demonstrate the “impact” of research. Yet a subsequent analysis of the REF revealed that academics remain anxious about submitting outputs, such as journals articles and books, for evaluation that don’t fit into a single discipline. The Elsevier report found that: “most interdisciplinary research has a lower citation impact than other publications.”

With little consensus about assessment criteria, funders of research have sometimes eschewed interdisciplinary programmes because of their lack of capacity to evaluate them. Universities are also unsure how to evaluate interdisciplinary career patterns, and many publishers prefer to stay in safe disciplinary territory. There is a paucity of peer reviewers with experience in this area. Interdisciplinary REF submissions, funding proposals and research outputs are often sent to academics whose response is either “I can only evaluate a bit of this” or “why doesn’t this do what I do?”

But interdisciplinary research is only worth the extra effort it requires if it adds up to more than the sum of its parts. And much of it does: there are exciting interdisciplinary projects forcing their way up between the cracks in the concrete across academia. The UK funding councils are onto this: many are now establishing working groups to seek better ways to evaluate – and value – interdisciplinary research. The Academy of Medical Sciences launched a working group on “Team Science” in 2014, and the British Academy recently began a major consultative exercise.

New ways of evaluation

Earlier this year, to contribute to this process, Durham University’s Institute of Advanced Study (IAS) invited interdisciplinary experts and representatives from across the funding councils to a workshop to draw up some criteria for evaluation and methods for applying them.

In a new report drawing on this collaboration, we have set out some criteria and questions to consider at each stage of the interdisciplinary research process, from project development right through to evaluation of output. We argue that it’s important to allow researchers time to work with academics in other fields and give them access to training if needed. We have also raised questions about what happens when one discipline dominates an interdisciplinary project, and how that can be justified.

Institutional support also needs to be improved, including making sure centers and institutes that carry out interdisciplinary research are adequately valued and resourced by university management. Our report also proposes a few changes to the REF, such as identifying interdisciplinary experts and trialling a dedicated panel to assess research that is deemed as crossing more than one academic discipline.

We are now even more convinced that imagining interdisciplinary research as a kind of superstructure creating “bridges” between disciplines is misguided, and merely affirms their differences. Interdisciplinarity lies not above the academy, but in its very foundations. In this sense it is supportive of – rather than a challenge to – more specialised areas of knowledge.

Who Should Decide Cuts for UK’s Research Councils?

Athene Donald — Thu, 06 Aug 2015 22:00:50 +0000

Whose hands do you want on the handle?

When the government published its long-awaited science and innovation strategy with some fanfare last year it contained largely predictable (if laudable) enthusiastic platitudes. What was new was the announcement of the Nurse Review of the Research Councils.

This was to many minds surprising if not alarming, because the last standard triennial review of the Research Councils had only recently been completed. So that surprise and alarm is greatly increased now that, with no fanfare whatsoever and indeed a slightly under-the-counter feel about it, the government has declared there will be yet another review of Research Council funding. Conducted by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), this new review is expected to report back by September 2015 – potentially several months before that of Sir Paul Nurse.

This article by Athene Donald originally appeared at The Conversation, a Social Science Space partner site, under the title The Conversation. Read the “Researchers would make smarter cuts than management accountants”

Clash of the reviews

According to Research Fortnight this review, due to be carried out by McKinsey and Company, is part of a wider review commissioned by BIS aimed at identifying £450m in cuts the chancellor George Osborne has imposed on the department. Efficiency savings are the name of the game. Or in other words, short-term gain regardless of long-term cost.

It is too easy for a management consultant, unfamiliar with the world of science and research, to look at the existence of seven Research Councils and see a quick saving by cutting their numbers. Those in the UK research system are unlikely to see that as a good solution. The recent triennial review concluded that the number of research councils was right. The fact that money is tight doesn’t itself change the validity of that conclusion.

I doubt anyone involved with the Research Councils would presume to say there are absolutely no savings to be made. However, if someone has to decide where the axe should fall, I’m sure all would prefer it to be a respectable bunch of researchers – such as the panel Paul Nurse, the president of the Royal Society, has convened – than high-powered individuals unfamiliar with their world. Objective outsiders challenged to save money may not appreciate the vital parts of the funding ecosystem that they are destroying in the interests of streamlining.

Where does this leave the Nurse review?

Many questions are raised by the McKinsey review. What happens if the resulting report wants drastic changes? Will these be implemented before Sir Paul’s ink is even dry on his own report? Should he and his panel resign straight away? This is a very curious situation for a government-convened panel to find itself in, even if both the government and the relevant secretary of state have changed since it was created.

It could be argued that the two reviews serve different purposes. The remit of the Nurse Review covers many more things than merely efficiency savings, and in fact this is not mentioned in its terms of reference. The McKinsey review is intended to look across the whole of BIS’s work rather than focus on the Research Council structure. Nevertheless, the more recent McKinsey review will undoubtedly impact on the former.

Streamlining in the interests of saving money could, for example, totally scupper any plans to improve interdisciplinary working. What happens if Sir Paul suggests costly new mechanisms to support research that crosses disciplinary boundaries? Is this a non-starter before the ideas are on the table? In summary, is the whole Nurse review turned into a lame duck overnight?

The damage posed by short term cost-cutting

Finally let me return to the point of short-termism. For the long-term growth of our economy, BIS should worry first about how to deliver the productivity and innovation that Osborne’s speeches have highlighted. As is well documented by the Science Campaign and in Mariana Mazzucato’s book The Entrepreneurial State, the UK’s research base is vital in enabling industry to deliver the the productivity and innovation the government desires. University research, funded in large part by the Research Councils, needs long term stability to deliver.

Paul Nurse was challenged to “examine and produce recommendations on how Research Councils can evolve to support research in the most effective ways … that best contribute to sustainable growth”. He has consulted widely, and his work has the potential to produce well-informed decisions that will encourage growth in the UK economy. It may, as it now turns out, be pointless.

So let me make my own recommendation for an efficiency saving. If Osborne, as is claimed, “gets” the importance of research, why doesn’t he suggest that the secretary of state saves money by scrapping the McKinsey Review and sticking with the one already underway? I’m not holding my breath.

Giving Euroscepticism an Honest Hearing

Michael Todd, Social Science Space editor — Wed, 05 Aug 2015 21:31:03 +0000

The European Union, based on which precursor organization you choose, has roots back to the 1950s, although the Maastricht Treaty that formalized the regional body wasn’t signed until 1992. Even before Maastricht, in the 1980s, the term ‘Eurosceptic’ started popping up in the British press. The term’s cachet roughly tracks major expansions (or attempted expansions) of the EU’s remit in subsequent years.

Despite its pedigree, Euroscepticism traditionally was seen as a peripheral viewpoint. Until now, as a new special issue of the journal International Political Science Review that examines Euroscepticism’s migration “from the margins to the mainstream” explains. The special issue proved remarkably prescient: A year of potential Grexits, Brexits and immigration kerfuffles has spotlighted the seams in the European Union and made the future of the Euro and the union itself a global topic.

In reality, explains Nathalie Brack, a University of Brussels postdoc who with Nicholas Startin of the University of Bath guest edited the special issue, Euroscepticism broadened its appeal a decade ago in the failed effort to create a European constitution. At the same time, Euroscepticism became more complex than the default binary of being merely for or again union. But now, “with the Greece crisis it has become much more salient and much more complex,” Brack said.

The salience was sharpened first by Greece’s financial saga and now by Britain’s upcoming referendum on remaining in the EU. Citing co-editor Startin’s own paper in the issue, “Have we reached a tipping point? The mainstreaming of Eurosceptocism in the UK,” Brack suggested “next year is a crucial moment for the UK and for the EU.

“The EU has often been described as ‘crisis-prone.’ With each crisis we say we have reached a tipping point or we are in a deep crisis we have never seen before. But I think the current crisis is really an existential crisis because there is no global vision about the EU; there is no leadership, really. You have problems all around — the potential exit of the UK, the crisis in Greece, you have increasing debate about the issue of solidarity, a permanent questioning about the added value of the EU because most people see it purely as an economic issue and now it’s failing on the economic level as well.”

That added complexity, meanwhile, shows up in the proliferation and prominence of political parties with a Eurosceptic bent, such as Alternative fur Deutschland, the National Front or the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP). Eurosceptical parties on the left and the right – and it’s usually the extremes of each side that prove the most skeptical – range from those which oppose the mere idea of sovereignty-robbing integration to those who seek unilateral withdrawal (or as in the case of Greece, unilateral ejection) to those who dislike the current trajectory of the EU or are dissatisfied with core EU policies but automatically to resort to some sort of ‘nuclear option.’

Sometimes, as in the case of UKIP, parties would just as soon see the EU collapse, but their priority is they really want their nation out of the EU, and should the other states remain in the club that doesn’t really matter to them.

Brack stresses that Euroscepticism is not just a product of the far right, as the emergence of Greece’s Syriza party sort-of demonstrates. The rhetoric of the right-wing sceptics is usually harder, trading “on people’s fear of the other,” Brack said, which translates into the anti-immigrant positions prominent at the moment. “It’s really a good case for radical right parties, especially in France and the UK, where they are using increased illegal immigration as a way to show that borders matters and that each member state should be able to control its own border. This has the potential to really increase the vote for radical right parties.”

By the same token, these jingoistic positions based on identity and sovereignty creates unease many observers who remember the nationalistic tragedies of World War II all too well; “I think that’s why most people find them scary,” Brack said.

While Brack said she understands that, unusually among academics she’s not so quick to write the rightists off as extremists to be ignored. “We should differentiate between and among parties,” especially since many have good ideas about European integration that a bunker mentality among the Euro-stalwarts risks missing.

On the left, and in countries that traditionally were more Euro-accepting than Eurosceptical, the EU’s fingerprints on austerity measures — “It is a reminder of the presence of the EU weekly on the news” — has nurtured growth since the EU can then be blamed for these measures.

Does then opposing austerity make one a Eurosceptic? Looking specifically at Greece, Brack noted first that while some observers consider it something different, “personally I think it is comparable to other radical left parties that are Eurosceptic” even if in the context of the just-passed crisis it took a different flavor.

Brack’s own contribution to the special issue was an examination of Eurosceptics inside the European parliament. She’s identified a four-point scale for these fish out of water, politicians in a body that many of them reject in whole or part”

Those who concentrate on the national level exclusively, and so they’re not involved in the European Parliament in which they sit;
Those who want to gather information about the EU, but they mainly use the parliamentary platform to make speeches and to disparage the parliament and so they remain outsiders;
Those who are partially engaged in parliamentary activities but mostly the ones that interest them or that they think EU might actually provide an added value. These members of the European Parliament don’t want to compromise but still want to have results; and
Those who are much more involved and in fact don’t see themselves as oppositional actors, and so they try to avoid making too many references to their Euroscepticism.

Brack herself was “deeply federalist” when she started her Eurosceptic studies, she said. “I didn’t understand why people opposed to the EU would want to be in the parliament.”

“It is not up to academics to fight against [Euroscepticism],” Brack said, which is not universally accepted. “For me Euroscepticism has something to bring to the European Parliament. It is an important bit of democracy. It is the only opposition that exists; maybe in future other opposition parties will arise but that have not so far.

“ I think Eurosceptic MEPs, and more generally a debate on the EU with Eurosceptics present, is really an asset — if European leaders could engage in such a debate, which is not the case at the moment.” Eurosceeptics represent a part of the citizenry, and without them the EU’s governance is that much less representative. Plus, the sceptics’ criticisms focus attention on efficiency and transparency, areas where the European Union has long been deficient. To see these debates, she concluded, “requires that other parties engage in them in debate, and not just label them as outsiders or extremists.”

AllTrials Opens Curtains on Clinical Trials

Social Science Space — Wed, 05 Aug 2015 10:00:37 +0000

The goal of AllTrials is to improve transparency for medical trials. (Photo: U.S. Army photo by Rick Scavetta, U.S. Army Africa Public Affairs/Flickr)

Replicating a successful transparency program operated by Sense About Science in Europe, Sense About Science USA last week launched an American version of its campaign to get pharmaceutical companies to both register their clinical trials and then reveal the data – all the data – those trials generate.

“Imagine,” asked Steven Woloshin, a professor at the Dartmouth Institute for health policy and clinical practice, “there was an election. Would you trust the results if only half of the votes were reported? Imagine if the winner of the election was the one who decided which half of the voting was reported? That would be crazy, but that’s what the situation is when trials are not reported.” The institute, along with Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine and Sense About Science USA are leading the US arm of the now international effort known as AllTrials.

As detailed on the AllTrials website, “Millions of volunteers have participated in clinical trials to help find out more about the effects of treatments on disease, yet that important ethical principle about reporting [detailed in the now 50-year-old Declaration of Helsinki] has been widely ignored. Information on what was done and what was found in these trials could be lost forever to doctors and researchers, leading to bad treatment decisions, missed opportunities for good medicine, and trials being repeated.” As an Economist leader noted last month, the missing data created “a polluted evidence base” that at best wastes time and money and at worst costs lives.

And so the AllTrials campaign began in January 2013 with four specific requests:

Make public that a clinical trial has been (or is being) conducted by logging it on an open register;
Give a brief summary of the trial’s results;
Provide full details about the trial’s methods and results; and
Release individual patient data from the trial.

The requests are directed at both pharmaceutical companies and academics. As The Economist opined, “If anything, academics have an even worse record of disclosure than firms.”

The initial campaign is now supported by thousands of individual patients, clinicians and researchers across the world, and by hundreds of organizations representing millions of people. In its second week, some 51 mostly medically oriented organizations have joined the U.S. effort already.

The concept gained a big shot in the arm in April when the World Health Organization extended its 10-year-old call for all future clinical trials to release their data within a year to encompass all past trial too, since the medicines and therapies currently in use all came from past work. (WHO has operated the the International Clinical Trials Registry Platform since 2005.)

As WHO detailed in an article in PLoS Medicine:

The Declaration of Helsinki and other statements have outlined the compelling reasons why interventional clinical trials should be reported in a timely fashion. In brief, not reporting clinical trial results is likely to lead to dissemination bias. This bias has the following major adverse consequences:

It affects understanding of the scientific state of the art.

It leads to inefficiencies in resource allocation for both research and development and financing of health interventions.

It creates indirect costs for public and private entities, including patients themselves, who pay for suboptimal or harmful treatments.

It potentially distorts regulatory and public health decision making.

“Patients want the treatments that are best for them,” explained campaign co-founder Ben Goldacre, a medical doctor and author of the best-selling Bad Science (which shares the name of his popular blog). “This needs good quality evidence on what works. Unfortunately, we now know that around half of all clinical trials, on the treatments we use today, are withheld from doctors, researchers, and patients. This makes a mockery of our efforts to make truly informed decisions. It also puts the reputation of the entire medical profession—and pharma—on the line.” (Click here for Goldacre and Sense About Science’s Sile Lane’s description of the history of AllTrials.)

In addition to Sense About Science, the AllTrials campaign is an initiative of Bad Science, BMJ, Centre for Evidence-based Medicine, Cochrane Collaboration, James Lind Initiative and PLOS. To join the campaign, sign the AllTrials petition or get involved more energetically. To sign the petition on behalf of an organization, email your organization’s logo and a short statement to jcockerill@senseaboutscience.org. And to make a donation to the AllTrials campaign, please click here.

Three Webinars Give Tips on Data Mining

Social Science Space — Tue, 04 Aug 2015 23:34:21 +0000

An archived version of a webinar offering strategies and tools for text and data mining for scholars in the social sciences and humanities has been posted by the Center for Research Libraries.

Peter Leonard, director or the Digital Humanities Laboratory and Lindsay King, assistant director of the Haas Arts Library, both at the Yale University Library, are the presenters in the 80-minute webinar, which appears below. Leonard explains how three trends – heaps of digitized source material now coming available, the software that allows plowing through this data, and improvements in technique and technology – are spurring interest in data mining. King, meanwhile, looks at a particular project — Robots Reading Vogue — as a demonstration of these research applications.

As Leonard told the Yale Daily News last fall, ““We think of libraries as buying physical books, and Yale libraries will never stop. But we also want to develop ways of making sense of large cultural collections.”

The CRL has also held two webinar on mining Big Data in economics.

The first, from October 2014, was hosted by Robin Bew, managing director of the Economist Intelligence Unit, and Chris Pearce, who directs the unit’s global data operations. They examined how their employer supports the complex global data needs of major academic research projects in the field of international trade and economics.

The second, from February 2015, with presenters Bernard Reilly, from the Center for Research Libraries, and Bobray Bordelon of Princeton University, looked both at trends emerging in publishing financial and economic data, particularly from the developing world, and at how the balance has shifted between open access and commercial publication of international data.

(h/t InfoDocket)

Here Be Dragons: The Perils of Predatory Publishing

Michael J.I. Brown — Tue, 04 Aug 2015 10:00:05 +0000

The need to ‘publish of perish’ may send many academics adrift in unknown and dangerous waters of the predatory and vanity journals. It’s worth keeping a weather eye before sailing over the edge.

Radio National’s Background Briefing recently presented a grim academic tale of identity theft, shambolic conferences, exploitation, sham peer review and pseudoscience.

Presenter Hagar Cohen provided an eye-opening introduction to predatory academic publishing and conferences, with a particular focus on the publisher OMICS Group. It was also a very human story, including researchers traveling across the globe only to find they’re attending an imitation of an academic conference.

Why do predatory and vanity academic publishers and conferences exist? Why are they flourishing now? And what can they tell us about the failings of academia?

This article by Michael J.I. Brown originally appeared at The Conversation, a Social Science Space partner site, under the title “Vanity and predatory academic publishers are corrupting the pursuit of knowledge”

Publish

“Publish or perish” is a simplification of academic life, but contains an element of truth. There’s little point undertaking research if you don’t tell anybody about it, and this has been true for centuries. Four centuries ago, astronomers such as Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler discussed their observations, calculations and methods in books.

Understandably, academic publications, citations of publications and conference presentations have become metrics for academic performance. One can (and should) argue about the legitimacy of such metrics, but they are a fact of modern academic life.

Peer review of manuscripts by academics is also critical to academic publishing. Does the manuscript add to the body of knowledge? Does the manuscript accurately discuss previous work? Are there significant errors in the manuscript? Does the manuscript clearly communicate relevant methods, results and arguments? Are the conclusions of the manuscript justified?

Peer review is imperfect, but prevents many dubious manuscripts from being published. It effectively excludes authors who are unwilling or unable to meet the standards of mainstream academic publishing.

Vanity and predators

Both vanity and predatory academic publishers exploit opportunities created by legitimate peer review and academic performance metrics. In particular, they allow authors to publish articles that would never survive legitimate peer review.

Vanity academic journals have existed for decades, and these imitations of legitimate journals often promote particular (discredited) ideas or have strong ideological biases. For example, the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons,/em> may sound respectable, but publishes pseudoscience including HIV-AIDS denial, climate contrarianism and anti-vaccination scaremongering.

More recently, there has been an explosion of predatory journals, which seek to make large profits by publishing (for a fee) virtually anything that comes their way. While predatory publishers claim to peer-review articles, this is often a sham.

For example, on Background Briefing I discussed “Discovering the Total Contents of the Universe”, which was published in an OMICS journal. This article was supposedly peer-reviewed, but isn’t based on observations nor a scientific methodology. Instead, it makes claims about aliens based on “ancient Indian scriptures” and “a mathematical language, which has long been forgotten by mankind”. To be blunt, it is nonsense.

While most academics ignore dubious journals, such publications have an impact beyond academia. The vanity Journal of Cosmology often publishes bogus claims of alien life, which sections of the media credulously repeat.

I’ve also seen activists reference studies from predatory journals in an attempt to bolster their arguments.

Exploitation

Predatory publishers often exploit the goodwill of legitimate academics. Being invited to present at a conference or edit a journal is usually evidence of being held in high esteem by your peers. It can be an opportunity too good to miss, but with predatory publishers there’s a sting in the tail.

Predatory publishers often invite academics to join editorial boards, giving journals an air of legitimacy. However, they often ignore academics’ feedback on manuscripts or even use academics’ names without permission.

Similarly, predatory outfits will invite academics to present at conferences, for a hefty fee, but those conferences may be pale imitations of real conferences. Background Briefing attended a shambolic conference in Brisbane with fewer than 30 attendees. Many of the speakers listed on the program did not attend. One has to wonder if the missing speakers even knew they were on the conference program.

Online explosion

University of Colorado librarian Jeffrey Beall maintains a list of hundreds of potentially predatory publishers, which produce thousands of dodgy journals. Most of these publishers have appeared in the past decade.

This proliferation is an unfortunate side effect of online open access publishing. Online publications do not have the overheads of printed journals, as they require only a website and correctly formatted PDF documents. Conference venues across the globe can be booked online with a credit card. Since this requires only a computer, many predatory publishers operate from modest offices or suburban houses.

Traditionally journals have been available via subscription only, often at considerable expense to institutions. Open access publications are available to everyone instantly, which potentially unlocks academic knowledge, but requires fees from the authors (or funding agencies) to remain viable. This opens the door for predatory publishers seeking to prise money from authors, resulting in thousands of new suspect journals.

Lessons

Can the vanity and predatory publishers provide lessons for academia? Clearly, no sector of the community (including academia) is free from shonky online operators.

While it would be cute to assume there are just good and bad publishers, sometimes the practices of the dodgy operators can be found elsewhere. Springer and IEEE have published gibberish produced by a computer program. Elsevier publishes Homeopathy, despite homeopathy having no scientific basis. Academics must strive to maintain and improve academic standards, including at major publishers.

It would also be wrong to assume that functioning peer review is a simple arbiter of right and wrong. There is a spectrum of peer review, with quality varying from journal to journal. Peer review is only a quality-control process that can sometimes fail, even at the best journals.

That said, those who knowingly avoid peer review by submitting to vanity and predatory publishers are effectively avoiding scrutiny and rigour. They are deliberately avoiding what is needed to advance knowledge and understanding.

Seeing Others as Fully Human

Jennifer Anderson — Mon, 03 Aug 2015 10:00:36 +0000

Here’s a quiz for you: Do you see pickers — or people? (Photo: “Polish berry pickers color” by Lewis Hine, coloured by Robek – Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons)
How is one person able to commit crimes against another? Social psychologists say that the perpetrator fails to think spontaneously about the other person’s mind.

That failure dehumanizes the victim, putting him or her on par with objects or animals.

Evil people dehumanize their victims in committing genocide and other atrocities. But as research in Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences explains, we all are capable of dehumanizing others.

Brain imaging studies corroborate the findings of social scientists, research author Lasana T. Harris, professor of social and organizational psychology at the Institute of Psychology in the Netherlands, states in “Why Economic, Health, Legal, and Immigration Policy Should Consider Dehumanization.”

These studies show areas of the brain responsible for social cognition fail to ignite when participants are shown pictures of the homeless or drug addicts, or when they play violent video games, or when heterosexual men view photos of underdressed women.

Harris explains that the social context—other people, institutions and culture within the environment—influences how one person views another. In other words, the social context shapes how one person thinks about the other person’s mind.

Consider fantasy sports leagues. Imaging studies have shown that regions of the brain engaged in social cognition deactivate when people “purchase” players in a fantasy league. Harris explains that the participants dehumanize the players so that they can calculate their worth based on performance.

Dehumanization also has implications in economics, health care and other societal realms. And as Harris points out, policy makers have the capacity to change the social context that influences how one group views another.

Economics

Harris proposes that dehumanization may have played a role in the recent financial crisis. The only way a lender could approve a subprime mortgage would be to ignore the distress the buyer would eventually face when the home gets repossessed, instead focusing on the commission from the loan and benefit to the company.

Policy makers and regulators need to be aware of conflicts of interest in which dehumanization can be promoted and rewarded.

Health Care

Not all instances of dehumanization are harmful. Doctors and nurses may dehumanize patients out of necessity to blunt their own emotional responses to suffering.

Harris suggests perhaps healthcare workers who perform technical expertise avoid patient interactions to limit the cost of empathy on performance.

In the Courtroom

Legal decisions require making connections between the mind and the behavior. By dehumanizing the defendant—referring to the defendant only as the defendant with no allusions to personality traits—lawyers can achieve a less-severe sentence.

Policy makers can even the playing field by making sure factual evidence presented in a case appear alongside personality data.

Immigration

When one person perceives another as less than human, he or she often is feeling what Harris describes as disgust. “People at the bottom of the social hierarchy receive disgust and contempt, presumably because of moral violations associated with such people,” the paper states.

One group chronically at the bottom is immigrants. But through policy, lawmakers can help society see immigrants as individuals rather than as part of a homogeneous group.

Changing Perceptions

Policy makers are uniquely placed to shape the social context that influences dehumanization. Through policy, lawmakers can promote the well-being of the entire society and help ensure each member is viewed as a full human being.

Bill: Make ‘National Interest’ Explicit in NSF Grants

Michael Todd, Social Science Space editor — Fri, 31 Jul 2015 21:04:20 +0000

Texas Republican Lamar Smith is the chair of the U.S. House Committee on Science, Space and Technology.
In February officials with the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the National Science Board trooped up Capitol Hill to present the NSF and NIST budget requests to the House of Representatives committee that oversees science and technology spending. On that day, the chairman of the House panel, Texas Republican Lamar Smith, was unusually insistent on getting the chairman of the National Science Board and the director of the NSF to endorse some specific language on scientific merit and the national interest, language that he was linking to failed legislation he had authored the year before.

Both Dan Arvizu of the NSB and France Córdova of the NSF seemed cagey about directly approving the language, even though it was fairly anodyne – who would oppose the national interest, after all? – and essentially was drawn both from the NSF’s original charter and a policy statement the NSF had issued a few months before.

“I can speak without hesitation that I support the goal,” Arvizu testified.

That wasn’t good enough. “Beyond the goal,” Smith pressed, “do you support the language?”

Arvizu relented. “With what we’ve seen so far, I think we can support the language.”

It was widely expected then that Smith intended to reintroduce his failed bill, the Frontiers in Innovation, Science, and Technology (FIRST) act, or at least some aspects of it. Since portions of that bill had been criticized by the National Science Board, and generally castigated by the larger science and academic community, some reluctance in answering even innocent questions — that then might have been construed as a larger endorsement — might have seemed in order. There is, after all, no universally accepted definition of “national Interest.”

This week Smith introduced a three-page bill, the Scientific Research in the National Interest Act (officially House Resolution 3293), which mandates that each NSF public announcement of a grant award be accompanied by a non-technical explanation of the project’s scientific merits and how it serves the national interest.

Citing past NSF-funded projects that he deemed had not met this low bar, Smith said a press release, “federal research agencies have an obligation to explain to American taxpayers why their money is being used on such research instead of on more worthy projects.”

In that release, Smith cited the earlier meeting with Córdova and explained that his innocuous request was indeed innocuous:

At a Science Committee hearing held earlier this year, NSF Director France Córdova agreed with a legislative effort to uphold a national interest standard for taxpayer-funded research grants. The Scientific Research in the National Interest Act is virtually identical to a provision that passed the House this spring as part of the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2015. The bill states that the NSF written justification is to be made after a proposal has completed NSF’s reviews for merit and broad impacts. The bill clearly states, “Nothing in this section shall be construed as altering the Foundation’s intellectual merit or broader impacts criteria for evaluating grant applications.”

The same science and academic associations that opposed Smith’s FIRST bill, and which oppose the current version of the COMPETES reauthorization, so far have not overwhelmingly opposed Smith’s newest effort but have expressed deep skepticism that his idea of ‘national interest’ will in no way gibe with theirs. For example, the American Psychological Association, in an echo of Arvizu’s February testimony, accepts the bill’s stated goal but is leery of the language:

The American Psychological Association supports the National Science Foundation’s (NSF’s) implementation (already underway) of increased transparency and accountability policies regarding its funding of fundamental research. We are concerned that in the press release announcing the new Scientific Research in the National Interest Act, Chairman Smith again substitutes political review for peer review in explicitly attacking individual NSF grants. This appears to belie his stated intention to refrain from “altering the Foundation’s intellectual merit or broader impacts criteria for evaluating grant applications.” APA is opposed to any efforts that would discourage researchers from proposing cutting-edge projects and stifle the progress of scientific innovation and discovery.”

In its statement of “serious concerns,” the American Anthropological Association agreed that taxpayer dollars are precious, but suggested that fact didn’t give politicians special powers to discern what constitutes good science.

We are mindful that researchers must be accountable for the federal dollars that support us. We also believe, however, that it is ill-advised for Congress to exert political pressure and impose a “selection of science” based on something other than scientific merit.

The Consortium of Social Science Associations (a Social Science Space partner) also walked a fine line of expressing enormous skepticism but not veering into outright dismissal, saying, “we object to political interference in the determination of ‘what is worthwhile science in the national interest.’”

In its statement, COSSA cut to the heart of the disagreement – who decides what is in the national interest when it comes to science, politicians or scientists: “While H.R 3293 states, ‘Nothing in this section shall be construed as altering the foundation’s intellectual merit or broader impacts criteria for evaluating grant applications,’ the bill seeks to codify a definition of “national interest” that could be interpreted in ways that would do just that.” It added that since the NSF already supports the stated goal, there is no need to add this legislation to the pile.

Smith acknowledged NSF’s noble plans, but explained, “This legislation makes this commitment permanent.”

It’s not that there is no attempt at supplying a definition. Smith’s bill offers a seven-point test. An NSF grant would be in the national interest if it: increases the nation’s economic competitiveness, advances Americans’ health and welfare, develops a national science and technology workforce that is globally competitive, increases Americans’ science and technology literacy or engagement, increases academia’s connection with industry, supports national defense, or promotes the progress of science in the U.S. Given Smith’s attempts to halve social science spending in the COMPETES reauthorization, it’s an open questions as to whether social science fits well into these criteria’s definition of ‘science.’

Smith’s bill has two Democratic co-sponsors – Dan Lipinski of Illinois and Alan Grayson of Florida — among the 16 Republicans alongside Smith. Members of the science and academic community had met with Lipinski just the week before Smith’s press release to express their concerns about the ‘national interest’ language in the COMPETES bill and Lipinski’s support for that language. Attendees at that meeting reported that the congressman believes that the seventh criteria in defining national interest, that a worthy grant promotes the progress of science, is broad enough to protect the current NSF peer-review process from running afoul of the letter of the law.

Most Democrats, however, will likely oppose the new legislation. The leading Democrat on Smith’s Science, Space, and Technology Committee, Eddie Bernice Johnson (also a Texan), echoed the idea that Smith’s ‘national interest’ wouldn’t be universally recognized as such. “Chairman Smith has been investigating NSF grants he doesn’t like since he became chairman of the committee. This legislative effort is very much connected to his effort to impose his own, political level of review on NSF’s gold standard merit-review process.”

Sheldon Solomon on Fear of Death

Social Science Bites — Thu, 30 Jul 2015 22:05:14 +0000

LISTEN TO SHELDON SOLOMON NOW!

Unlike the character in the movie The Sixth Sense, we actually don’t see dead people. Westerners go to great lengths to excise thoughts about death (real death, that is, not movie death) or being in the presence of death. Sheldon Solomon, on the other hand, routinely thinks about the unthinkable, and how humans behave differently when the unthinkable forces its way into their thoughts.

Solomon, a social psychologist at New York’s Skidmore College, along with two other experimental social psychologists, Jeff Greenberg and Tom Pyszczynski, developed the idea of ‘terror management theory’ more than three decades ago to test out scientifically how the mere specter of mortality alters behavior.

Here, in conversation with Social Science Bites’ Nigel Warburton, Solomon specifically addresses the fear of death and how his views were derived from the earlier work of Ernest Becker. Becker, Solomon explains, called the fear of death the “main spring of human activity.” Nonetheless we don’t want to face death directly, Solomon adds, and so, “Just like most of us are unaware of the internal dynamics of the engine that drives our car, we are equally unaware of what it is that impels us to do what we do every day.”

Various experiments bear that out. When primed with the thought of death, judges reminded of death mete out tougher penalties, American voters shifted their prospective votes from a liberal to a conservative, shoppers shift from bargain brands to status symbols.

“And now the real work can commence,” he explains, “which is the nuances: what are the personality variables that influence how vigorously and how defensively one will react? And we know some of those. We know that insecurely-attached and highly-neurotic people respond more defensively when they are reminded of death. But now, we’re in the process, in part we’re studying people who are terminally ill in hospice settings because we know that there has to be tremendous variation – that some people are more comfortable with the prospect of the inevitability of death than others. That’s really what we want to get a handle on right now.”

Solomon earned a bachelor’s degree from Franklin and Marshall College and a doctorate from the University of Kansas. He’s taught at Skidmore, where he’s currently the Ross Professor for Interdisciplinary Studies, since 1980 after joining the faculty at age 26. (He also co-owns a restaurant in the Skidmore’s home of Saratoga Springs.) Along with Greenberg and Pyszczynski he wrote the 2003 book In the Wake of 9/11: The Psychology of Terror, in which terror management theory (which is not in itself about terrorism) is used to analyze the roots of terrorism. Their most recent book together is this year’s The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life, which presents terror management theory and more than 30 years of research demonstrating that conscious and unconscious death anxiety has a pervasive influence on human attitudes and behavior.

To directly download this podcast, right click HERE and “Save Link As.”

Click HERE to download a PDF transcript of this conversation. The full text also appears below.

Social Science Bites is made in association with SAGE. For a complete listing of past Social Science Bites podcasts, click HERE.

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David Edmonds: Death: there’s a joyful topic. Best avoided perhaps. Best not to talk about it. But maybe we’re always thinking about death, sometimes in a subconscious way. Sheldon Solomon, with colleagues Jeff Greenberg and Tom Pyszczynski, has developed over many years a morbid fascination with death.

Nigel Warburton: Sheldon Solomon, welcome to Social Science Bites.

Sheldon Solomon: Thank you so much for having me.

NW: The topic we’re going to focus on is fear of death. Let’s just start by talking a little bit about how you became interested in the fear of death, as a psychologist.

SS: Well, in part, I became interested because as a young child when I realised that I would someday die I found that a decidedly unwelcome realisation. So, I have a personal stake in these matters. And then, quite by accident, as a young professor, I ran into a book by a now-deceased cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker called The Denial of Death. And what Becker proposed is that humans are unique because we’re the only creatures that know that we will someday die and that our death can occur at any time, that we can never control, and that we’re basically animals — breathing pieces of defecating meat — no more significant than lizards or potatoes. And if that’s all we thought about, according to Becker, we wouldn’t be able to stand up in the morning. What he says is that the way that we manage death-anxiety is by embracing culturally constructed beliefs that give us a sense that we are valuable individuals in a meaningful universe. And, according to Becker, the fear of death underlies almost everything that we do but we’re often quite unaware of it because it manifests itself in our need to preserve faith in our culturally constructed beliefs and, in a sense, that we’re valuable individuals.

NW: So you’re saying that for Becker the fear of death is almost like a battery charging us with energy to do other things?

SS: In fact, nicely done. He calls it the “main spring of human activity.” Just like most of us are unaware of the internal dynamics of the engine that drives our car, we are equally unaware of what it is that impels us to do what we do every day.

NW: Now, Becker was very influenced by psychoanalysis, I believe, and not an empirical psychologist like you. What seems to me distinctive about your approach is that you try to test some of the hypotheses that he put forward, and some more as well.

Ernest Becker

SS: Yes, that’s right. Becker won a Pulitzer Prize for his book but was literally ignored by academics. And when we first started talking about Becker’s ideas it was not well-received: our first paper was rejected with a single sentence review: “I have no doubt that these ideas are of no interest to any psychologist – alive or dead.” Eventually, colleagues just said well you know, if you’re to be taken seriously as academic psychologists well then you need to provide empirical support in the traditional scientific sense of the word.

NW: So, you have done that. Could you give an example of the kind of empirical work that you’ve done in this area?

SS: Certainly. It actually took us a while. At first, we were like – wow, yes, how do we show this? I mean, this is a bold claim: your beliefs about reality serve to deny death. What happened, frankly, is what often does in science and that’s that we were the beneficiaries of a happy accident. We had a student who was in a death and dying class and in that class students were asked to write their own obituaries and to help them do that, they were given a little sheet with a couple of questions on it that were along the lines of: why don’t you think about your thoughts and feelings associated with your own death. And when we saw that, we were like – wow; well, let’s see what would happen if we ask some people to think about themselves dying and other people to think about something unpleasant but not fatal. And so, the very first study that we did in Tucson, Arizona was with municipal court judges. We had half of the judges think about themselves dying and the other half not. And then we asked them to set bonds – just an amount of money that an alleged criminal would have to post in order to not be imprisoned – and all we wanted to see was whether or not being reminded of death would alter the judges’ evaluation of the case. And what we found astonished everybody, including the judges, because when not reminded of their mortality they set an average bond of $50 US but when they were reminded of death, the average bond was nine times higher: $455. When we asked the judges, do you think that thinking about your own death, could that have possible influenced your judgement? They were mortified. They were like: I will tear your heart out of your chest and show it to you while it’s still beating before you die. There’s no way that such a silly and superficially fleeting alteration in psychological conditions could have that profound an outcome.

NW: I mean, that is a dramatic difference isn’t it? So what’s your explanation?

SS: Our explanation – very simply – is that judges embrace certain beliefs about what’s right and wrong to the extent that – in this case the alleged crime was solicitation of prostitution – and to the extent that this is deemed morally dubious, that when we’re reminded of our mortality what we do is to bolster confidence in our cultural worldview and that this should be reflected by being extraordinarily punitive towards the prostitute. But it does cut both ways. It’s not only that death-reminders make us more unilaterally punitive. If that were the case, that wouldn’t be all that interesting, because it also works the other way. After being reminded of mortality, people give a greater reward for someone who behaves in a heroic fashion. And I think that that’s important. The general tenor of this research is that when people are reminded of death, it increases their affection for people who share their beliefs, while at the same time magnifying their hostility and disdain for folks who are different.

NW: I know you’ve done some research as well on how thinking about your own death might actually affect the way you vote.

SS: Yes we have and I also think that this is important and interesting research. Right after the terrible events on September 11 2001, we noticed that President George W. Bush’s popularity went up considerably. The day before September 11th, he had one of the lowest approval ratings in the history of polling. And three weeks later, he was one of the most popular presidents ever amongst Democrats as well as Republicans. So, following Max Weber, the German sociologist who said that in terms of historical upheaval we tend to embrace what he called charismatic leaders – just larger-than-life figures – that often proclaim that they’re divinely ordained to rid the world of evil, and in fact President Bush said that in the aftermath of September 11^th. And so, we did a variety of experiments but I think the most potent one was five weeks before the 2004 presidential election when we asked registered voters in New Jersey who intended to vote in the election. We reminded half of them of their mortality, the other half of something unpleasant and then we just said hey, secret ballot – who are you going to vote for in the election five weeks from now? And what we found was astonishing. In the control condition, our respondents said that they intended to vote for Senator Kerry by a four-to-one margin. However, after being reminded of their mortality, a different group of participants said that they intended to vote for President Bush by an almost three-to-one margin. And once again when we talked to the participants afterwards and when we said well, do you think that being reminded of your mortality may have influenced who you said you were going to vote for? they all denied that that could even be possible. But the fact that they were randomly assigned to conditions suggests that that was precisely what had happened.

NW: And are you talking about quite a large sample size here?

SS: Well, in this case, that study had a decent sample size: 40 or 50 participants. But we replicated that same phenomenon in more than 10 different experiments all over the US. It is an important point to note that every one of the empirical findings that I have alluded to has been replicated not only by our own research teams but, more importantly, by independent researchers who are not connected to our laboratory group.

NW: That is a very interesting issue because obviously there are many different potential causal factors at play and teasing out what precisely the causes were in any particular situation must be incredibly difficult.

SS: Yes, I believe it is. Academic psychology, the social sciences, are in diapers metaphorically relative to the natural sciences. We’re doing our best to use rigorous scientific methods in order to draw very firm causal conclusions about human affairs. But, you know, it’s like shining a flashlight at the moon and saying then oh, now I can see more. And so, for the moment, we have to rely on several things. One is replicability; you know, if it just happens once it doesn’t count. Cold fusion happened once in Utah – well, that doesn’t matter. So, the findings have to be replicated.

Secondly, whenever possible, we have to use different manipulations and so when we remind people of death sometimes we ask them questions how do you feel about dying? Sometimes we interview them outside, either in front of a funeral parlour or a hundred metres to either side. And I think most impressively, personally, is when people don’t even know that death is on their minds. We flash the word death on a computer for 28 milliseconds – so fast that you don’t see anything. What we argue is that no single study is definitive and what we’re trying to do is to triangulate on the so-called truth by repeated demonstrations, multiple manipulations of what we call mortality salience, and one more factor and that’s to have as many control groups as possible because some people say, and they’re right, well how do you know it’s death as opposed to other unpleasant events? And so, what we’ve done is to compare being reminded of one’s death with thirty or forty other unsavoury possibilities: think about being in a car accident and having your leg chopped off; think about going to the dentist and having a root canal and they’ve run out of anaesthetic; think about giving a speech in public and vomiting on the stage and being embarrassed and ostracised. And every time, so far, reminders of one’s mortality produce qualitatively different effects, and I believe this is essential.

NW: Do you think with your experiments on voting practices that you actually influenced the way people voted or was that a fairly ephemeral effect of the reminder?

SS: I would guess that it is a fairly ephemeral effect, but it doesn’t follow from that that the finding is inconsequential. So, for example, in the 2004 presidential election Senator Kerry was ahead in the polls four days before the election and then Osama Bin Laden released a tape threatening to drop some bombs all over the West. That’s an even better manipulation of mortality salience than anything we could have done in the lab. And so, yes, our view is that these effects may be fleeting but it doesn’t follow from that these findings are not of profound practical significance.

NW: I can imagine people in advertising discovering this phenomenon, being very intrigued as to how they might be able to use this knowledge to affect what people buy.

SS: Very good, and I think – I don’t mean this cynically, although I think I do sort of – advertisers know what they are doing. It did not take long after we started doing our research for very clever researchers to see what happens when people are reminded of their mortality in terms of their consumer preferences and behaviour. And so, there’s some fantastic studies that have shown that when Americans are reminded of their mortality and you ask them about their fiscal aspirations, they say yeah I want to be richer. And when you ask them: well, what kind of products would you like to buy? They’re like: no, I don’t want a can of Pringles and I don’t want a cheap Chevy Metro; I want a Lexus and I want a Rolex. What this does, at least in our mind, is to show that in part Americans, and I suspect people all over the western world where now we’re just surrounded by materialism and conspicuous consumption, our argument is that that’s driven in part because money has become a secular substitute for God. People think: wow, if I just have enough money I’ll be able to persist a little bit longer and ideally in perpetuity.

NW: Have you done experiments looking at the different kinds of attitudes people have to death, because some people are terrified of death and some people are quite glad that death will come as a relief? And I’d imagine they would act differently when reminded of their mortality.

SS: Yes, I suspect that that’s the case, but that’s where we’re now focusing our attention. What we started out to do was to just show that these death-reminders have potent effects on attitudes and behaviour and I think we’ve done that. And now the real work can commence which is the nuances: what are the personality variables that influence how vigorously and how defensively one will react? And we know some of those. We know that insecurely-attached and highly-neurotic people respond more defensively when they are reminded of death. But now, we’re in the process, in part we’re studying people who are terminally ill in hospice settings because we know that there has to be tremendous variation – that some people are more comfortable with the prospect of the inevitability of death than others. That’s really what we want to get a handle on right now.

Our view is that what’s dangerous are these fleeting reminders of death that get repressed and then manifest themselves in other ways – so like ‘I don’t like people who look different than I do’ or ‘I’m gonna vote for somebody who makes me feel comfortable’ or ‘I want more money’ or ‘I’m gonna drink or smoke more.’

NW: Some of these experiments that you’ve described are quite unexpected. I wonder where you actually got the idea for them from.

SS: Yes, that’s a great question. When you read science textbooks or psychology textbooks, you know it often appears as though we’re sitting in our offices and it’s just the result of a kind of a linear and rational thought process but the fact of the matter is that it’s often quite accidental and some of our best ideas have been at restaurants or in the bowling alley. You know, once we were at a Mexican restaurant, dipping chips in hot salsa and then we saw the newspaper article about a cook who was arrested because he dowsed a policeman’s eggs in hot sauce and we’re like wow that’s great: let’s use hot sauce as a measure of physical aggression. And so, we did an experiment where we reminded people of their mortality and we gave them an opportunity to dole out any quantity of hot sauce that they’d like to someone who did not share their beliefs. And what we found is that they doubled the amount of hot sauce, and this is really quite remarkable. So, the answer to your question is that very often it’s really only the boisterous and happy outcome of just us sitting around and bouncing ideas off each other.

NW: Your experiments have mostly been done on Americans, so I wonder if there’s a cultural factor at play here or whether this is some kind of universal that you’ve uncovered.

SS: Yes, great question. Our claim, based on Ernest Becker, is that the fear of death is universal. That obviously begs, from an empirical perspective, the question of well how do we know that? So, two things: one is that what we call morality salience effects have now been obtained in more than twenty countries on five continents – even in non-western cultures. So, I do believe that this is important because it establishes that it’s not an affectation of either modernity or Western European civilisation. Having said that, though, like any psychological phenomenon, I think a lot more work needs to be done cross-culturally as well as developmentally across the lifespan.

NW: There’s almost a cliché about contemporary society – at least Western society – we rarely see dead bodies, we don’t mention death that much. Now, there’s one reaction to that which is we ought to; we ought to have a memento mori to focus us on what’s important. But some of what you’ve said suggests that maybe it’s quite a dangerous thing to do to remind people of their own death.

SS: Good point. Our view is that what’s dangerous are these fleeting reminders of death that get repressed and then manifest themselves in other ways – so like I don’t like people who look different than I do or I’m gonna vote for somebody who makes me feel comfortable or I want more money or I’m gonna drink or smoke more. But that’s very different than what a lot of the philosophers and theologians from time immemorial have done, when they have said, as Albert Camus did: “Come to terms with death. Thereafter anything is possible.”

So, my view is that it’s not a good idea in the West to be a culture that really does try and brush death under the proverbial rug. We don’t see dead people. All the old people in America I think are in Florida right now. We spend billions of dollars on cosmetics to avoid the appearance of growing old. I don’t think that’s a particularly healthy approach to death. So, even though it may seem quite counterintuitive, our argument is that if there’s any credence to these ideas that what we ought to be doing, both individually and as a society, is to acknowledge that death-fears have a pervasive effect on human affairs and to just, metaphorically speaking, bring that out into the open – not so that we’re perpetually preoccupied with our mortality but to spend enough time acknowledging the fact that we’re transient creatures so that we can more deeply and fully appreciate the fact that we’re alive.

NW: Sheldon Solomon, thank you very much.

SS: Thank you very much.

Malaria Vaccine – Great Science But What’s the Point?

Robert Dingwall — Tue, 28 Jul 2015 09:24:06 +0000

A technician at work in a GSK lab focused on malaria research. (Photo: GSK/Flickr)
Health journalists have just celebrated another biomedical triumph – European regulatory approval for the first vaccine capable of producing resistance to malaria. As usual, the social science and public health questions about who is going to use it, and why they would bother, have been neglected.

The vaccine is certainly a great scientific achievement. The life-cycle of the malaria parasite is fiendishly complicated. Researchers have been trying to interrupt it for the best part of a century. Glaxo Smith Kline, developers of this specific vaccine, have been working on the problem for 30 years and conducting trials since 1998. Even the funds lobbed into the research pot by the Gates Foundation since 2001 have taken nearly 15 years to bear any kind of fruit. The scientists are rightly proud of what they have done.

Having gained regulatory approval, the vaccine’s next hurdle is the World Health Organization, which will consider later this year whether to recommend its adoption. WHO is currently in love with biomedical solutions to public health problems. Clearly, the usual pressures and enticements are being brought to bear on this decision. A wave of favourable coverage has been organized, Glaxo have declared that their vaccine will be supplied on a non-profit basis and WHO have a notoriously cosy relationship with the Gates Foundation. Regulatory approval, however, merely endorses, safety, efficacy and quality – that a product does what it says on the tin. It does not establish cost-benefit.

There are, however, really good reasons why WHO should not endorse the vaccine, reasons that would have been obvious if its development had benefitted from the user-centred design that Gates’s companies now take for granted. Nobody is pretending that the vaccine is a panacea. It has been developed to be effective against strains of malaria to be found in Africa and to be used in children. This focus is understandable, given the importance of malaria as a cause of death in childhood in Sub Saharan Africa. However, the vaccine will not, for example, assist anyone living in other parts of the world, where other strains of malaria are dominant, or international travellers, who will need to continue taking prophylactic medication.

In children, when used alongside existing control measures, such as insecticide treated sleeping nets, complete courses of treatment reduced malaria cases by about one-third. The vaccine seemed to have little benefit for the youngest infants (6-12 weeks) although there were very few of them in the study and there were plausible reasons why this effect might not have appeared. However, as so often, the problems lie in the detail of the Lancet paper where the findings are published.

Above all, this vaccination has to be delivered on a quite different schedule from any other vaccination programme, requiring four rather than three injections, only two of which coincide with other clinic attendances. In addition to buying the vaccines, health systems in poor countries will have to find the resources for a 40 per cent increase in the number of clinic sessions. They will also have to persuade parents or carers to bring the children to be vaccinated more often. Even in the favourable circumstances of a Phase III clinical trial, something like one third of the eligible children did not complete the full course of vaccinations. Although this is reflected in the analysis of outcomes, which are based on intention to treat rather than actual treatment, it hints at the challenge of realising these in routine practice. The benefits reported are likely to be an upper limit rather than those actually achievable.

There is a real risk that national vaccination programmes will simply divert resources from effective, low-cost, technologies, like bed nets, into a technically sophisticated intervention with limited benefit. The GSK press release notes that only 80 percent of the children in the trial had bed nets, which cost a fraction of the vaccine, can be delivered to parents in their homes, and require only support from local community health workers for correct use. The 20 percent of unprotected children may also have contributed to over-estimating the benefit from the vaccine: Were the reductions in malarial infections greater among that 20 percent than in those children who were already protected by bed nets.

Interventions of this kind also carry a risk of rebound effects. Although these are well-recognized in other areas, particularly energy and transport studies, health systems have been slower to acknowledge their importance. In this case, will vaccination create a false sense of security among parents, leading to less assiduous attention to other preventive measures like bed nets or environmental management?

As medical sociologists have often observed, it is easy to understand why some governments like technical solutions to public health issues: nothing else needs to change. A few shots are less troubling than providing better housing, cleaning up environments that facilitate mosquito breeding or addressing the poverty that leaves children less resistant to common infections.

It takes nothing away from the scientific achievement represented by this work to question its cost-benefit. These questions need go further, though, than the usual ones about the cost per QALY or life-year gained to look at the society-wide impact. Who will really gain from this vaccine? What will be its impact on the wider society and its health system, where it is used? Are there cheaper and more engaging ways of achieving the same benefits? The World Health Organization ought to be demanding better answers to these questions than those offered so far.