Apart from active confirmation bias, simple blind spots can also cause a lot of trouble. As one example heuristics and biases researchers Stanovich and Toplak found that their Actively Open-minded Thinking (AOT) instrument had a bug. It stood for twenty years because the bug was consonant with a secular-liberal worldview so no one really thought it might be wrong. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2019.03.006
This, of course, when the scientists themselves are honest, acting in good faith and eager to fix their mistakes as Stanovich and Toplak were.
In openly political fields like sociology and whateverstudies, you get "researchers" blatantly manufacturing their conclusions in scale construction.
As one example of some of the gems of scientific integrity in these fields is the finding that conservatives are higher in hostile sexism. Will any liberal check this? Of course not, because it conforms to their expectations that their political opponents are bad. Even if they are honest, if they just glance at a paper they won't question it, and it won't feel weird to read in a quick report on the research.
How was the sausage made? In at least one study, the entire hostile sexism scale was two items long, and one item was, not kidding, "feminists are making entirely reasonable demands of me." And in the greatest surprise ever people dislike their political opponents. Bam, conservatives bad, because we're measuring their attitudes towards politically partisan activists, not the fairer sex.
(The question also presumes that feminists' demands are reasonable. If the activist set are insane, a low score on the question would be an indicator of sanity, not misogyny or simple political partisanship. As an example, Simone de Beauvoir: "No, we don't believe that any woman should have this choice. No woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one. It is a way of forcing women in a certain direction.")
There's also the famous case of Bob Altemeyer's Right-wing Authoritarianism scale which is explicitly constructed so that leftists will score lower on it than rightists. Cue decades of results that authoritarianism is more prevalent on the right. Quelle surprise.
This, of course, when the scientists themselves are honest, acting in good faith and eager to fix their mistakes as Stanovich and Toplak were.
In openly political fields like sociology and whateverstudies, you get "researchers" blatantly manufacturing their conclusions in scale construction.
As one example of some of the gems of scientific integrity in these fields is the finding that conservatives are higher in hostile sexism. Will any liberal check this? Of course not, because it conforms to their expectations that their political opponents are bad. Even if they are honest, if they just glance at a paper they won't question it, and it won't feel weird to read in a quick report on the research.
How was the sausage made? In at least one study, the entire hostile sexism scale was two items long, and one item was, not kidding, "feminists are making entirely reasonable demands of me." And in the greatest surprise ever people dislike their political opponents. Bam, conservatives bad, because we're measuring their attitudes towards politically partisan activists, not the fairer sex.
(The question also presumes that feminists' demands are reasonable. If the activist set are insane, a low score on the question would be an indicator of sanity, not misogyny or simple political partisanship. As an example, Simone de Beauvoir: "No, we don't believe that any woman should have this choice. No woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one. It is a way of forcing women in a certain direction.")
There's also the famous case of Bob Altemeyer's Right-wing Authoritarianism scale which is explicitly constructed so that leftists will score lower on it than rightists. Cue decades of results that authoritarianism is more prevalent on the right. Quelle surprise.