Cognitive Distortions

[Kamaji]

Cognitive Distortions

How the culture wars came for Wikipedia’s articles about human intelligence.

Shuichi Tezuka
18 Jul 2022

In June 2018, the book Modern American Extremism and Domestic Terrorism published a false and defamatory statement about a living person, copied from a piece of Wikipedia vandalism. The statement was a fabricated quote about Linda Gottfredson, a psychologist known for her opposition to racial affirmative action policies, which compared her views in this area to Nazism. In an article published in the Critic in October 2020, I reported that an original source for this quote does not exist, and that the vandalism had remained in the Wikipedia biography for nearly two years—long enough for an academic book to repeat the hoax.

This was not an isolated case. Wikipedia hoaxes about topics including recently deceased people, South American wildlife, Middle Eastern cuisine, and hair products have all come to be regarded as “accepted knowledge” if they remained on the site for a sufficient period of time, and in many cases the false information was repeated in reputably published books or newspapers. The influence of Wikipedia hoaxes has also extended to papers published in academic journals. For example, a Wikipedia hoax describing a fictitious medical condition known as “glucojasinogen” went on to be discussed in several medical journals as though it were a real condition.

Damaging as they may be, hoaxes by individual pranksters are usually removed from Wikipedia as soon as they are discovered. Something far more potentially harmful, both to Wikipedia and to public knowledge as a whole, is when several users work together across multiple Wikipedia articles to discredit a body of scientific research, and do not allow their misrepresentations to be corrected by any of the site’s other users. This is what has occurred over the past two years on Wikipedia’s articles related to human intelligence.

Intelligence and psychometry

The study of human intelligence falls within a broader field known as psychometry, which refers to the measurement of psychological traits. Intelligence research is among the most replicable bodies of research in the social sciences: while many areas of psychology have been affected by the replication crisis during the 2010s (including some other branches of psychometry), a 2019 paper states that within intelligence research, “there is no replication crisis about key empirical findings.” Human intelligence is also among the most socially important areas of psychology, as Quillette described in a 2018 article, because of the large impact that a person’s intelligence may have on his or her life.

Before 2020, Wikipedia’s articles related to psychometry and human intelligence were mostly consistent with this field’s published literature, although many of these articles were somewhat outdated because there have never been many Wikipedia users with the necessary knowledge and interest to keep them updated. Under normal circumstances, Wikipedia articles increase in quality over time as more people contribute to them. However, for reasons that will be explained, the recent trend in articles related to human intelligence has been for Wikipedia’s coverage to become steadily more divorced from its source material. (In this article, when I refer to Wikipedia, I am referring specifically to the English-language version of the site.)

Over the past two years, there has been a collective decision by several members of Wikipedia that “scientific racism […] has infiltrated psychometry” and that the field must no longer be trusted. This assumption is explained in an FAQ created in May and June 2021:

Psychometry is a field where people who advocate scientific racism can push racist ideas without being constantly contradicted by the very work they’re doing. And when their data did contradict their racist views, many prominent advocates of scientific racism simply falsified their work or came up with creative ways to explain away the problems. See such figures as Cyril Burt, J. Phillipe [sic] Rushton, Richard Lynn, and Hans Eysenck, who are best known in the scientific community today for the poor methodological quality of their work, their strong advocacy for a genetic link between race and intelligence, and in some cases getting away with blatant fraud for many years.

In my 2021 paper, ‘Cognitive Creationism Compared to Young-Earth Creationism,’ for the inaugural issue of the Journal of Controversial Ideas, I describe how a large portion of attacks on intelligence research—and on psychometry or behavioral genetics more broadly—arise from attempts to discredit the small sub-area of intelligence research that deals with differences between racial or ethnic groups. The FAQ item quoted above was created for Wikipedia’s “Race and intelligence” article, which has been the epicenter of the recent changes to how Wikipedia covers topics related to human intelligence. That article was the first to be changed based on this new set of assumptions, and the changes have subsequently spread outward to Wikipedia articles about a broader range of topics. The following five cases are not the only articles affected, but are examples of the overall trend.

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Source:  https://quillette.com/2022/07/18/cognitive-distortions/