Diversifying science: comparing the benefits of citizen science with the benefits of bringing more women into science

Abstract

I compare two different arguments for the importance of bringing new voices into science: arguments for increasing the representation of women, and arguments for the inclusion of the public, or for "citizen science". I suggest that in each case, diversifying science can improve the quality of scientific results in three distinct ways: epistemically, ethically, and politically. In the first two respects, the mechanisms are essentially the same. In the third respect, the mechanisms are importantly different. Though this might appear to suggest a broad similarity between the cases, I show that the analysis reveals an important respect in which efforts to include the public are more complex. With citizen science programs, unlike with efforts to bring more women into science, the three types of improvement are often in conflict with one another: improvements along one dimension may come at a cost on another dimension, suggesting difficult trade-offs may need to be made.

Psychology's WEIRD Problems

“…In these cases, even the most well-meaning scientist would struggle to do good science if they simply parachute from the ivory tower bringing in their own biases and preconceptions, without greater involvement from the population studied (see, e.g., Haelewaters et al, 2021;Rowley and Camacho, 2015). This parallel between international and local research suggests that progress in both might require greater public participation in science: just as with cross-cultural collaboration, maybe it is always the case that science is best done only when the populations studied are deeply involved in the research from beginning to end (see, e.g., Dunlap et al, 2021;Evans and Potochnik, forthcoming;Santana, 2022;Schroeder, 2022). In line with this, greater attention to scholarship emerging from different contexts outside the Western mainstreamincluding, but not limited to, indigenous and decolonial perspectives, such as in Latin American liberation psychologycould not only enhance Western cross-cultural research, but even lead to more fundamental transformation when it comes to the theoretical, methodological, and institutional dimensions of psychological science as practiced within the Western context (see, e.g., Adams et al, 2015;Adams et al, 2019;Forscher et al, 2021;Gergen et al, 1996;IJzerman et al, 2021;Silan et al, 2021).…”