title: Explanatory Judgment, Moral Offense and Value-Free Science.
abstract: A popular view in philosophy of science contends that scientific reasoning is objective to the extent that the appraisal of scientific hypotheses is not influenced by moral, political, economic, or social values, but only by the available evidence. A large body of results in the psychology of motivated-reasoning has put pressure on the empirical adequacy of this view. The present study extends this body of results by providing direct evidence that the moral offensiveness of a scientific hypothesis biases explanatory judgment along several dimensions, even when prior credence in the hypothesis is controlled for. Furthermore, it is shown that this bias is insensitive to an economic incentive to be accurate in the evaluation of the evidence. These results contribute to call into question the attainability of the ideal of a value-free science.
authors.affiliation: Tilburg Center for Logic, Ethics and Philosophy of Science, Tilburg University, P.O. Box 90153, 5000 LE Tilburg, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Matteo
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Colombo
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology and Cognitive Sciences, Justus Liebig Universität Gießen, Gießen, Germany.
authors.forename: Leandra
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Bucher
authors.affiliation: Department of Social Psychology, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON Canada.
authors.forename: Yoel
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Inbar