This example concerns the importance of not being swayed by political or other self-interested considerations in evaluating the merit of scientific research and the need to remain open to theoretical perspectives that may be challenging of dominant paradigms. The example involves specifically the downplaying of critical opinions that I observed as a member of a site visit panel charged with appraising the merit of a grant application exploring neurological bases of psychology. As a member of this site visit panel, I observed practices, described in this chapter, that were designed to shield the grant application from negative appraisal.

One of the practices involved the site visit review panel dismissing dissenting opinions that raised questions about certain basic assumptions of the paradigm involved. I had been selected for the site visit panel as an expert on issues of culture who had been brought in to provide a perspective complementing that of the other faculty on the panel, whose expertise, if not disciplinary affiliation, was in biology and neuroscience. As members of the review panel, we were asked to write individual critical reviews of the funding proposal, with these reviews subject to discussion and further input by others in our group. In my review, I articulated some of the same critiques of neuroscience that have been raised in recent years by major theorists who, while highly supportive of neuroscience work in psychology, have raised concerns about its tendencies, in cases, to adopt stances that are reductionist or deterministic, and who have pointed to the difficulties entailed in mapping brain processes onto constructs in psychology (e.g., Barrett, 2009; Kagan, 2007). The other faculty on the site visit panel objected to my raising any of these types of concerns and asked to have everything that I had written deleted from the final site visit report (something that had not been done in the case of comments written by anyone else on our panel). I was given little opportunity to defend my views and no opportunity to include my concerns in the final report as a dissenting opinion.