But the larger issue is not the tendency to pick sides in this debate but to deny that there is a debate at all

From Motivated Reasoning Is Disfiguring Social Science by Chris Ferguson.

Yesterday I blogged about the gap between the Mandarin Class and citizenry on a whole range of topical policy issues.

This article explores why there is a gap between the policy positions of academic institutions and the knowledge that actually exists in the field. Basically academic institutions have a tendency to be driven by ideological factions who are willing to turn a blind eye to the empirical evidence which exists.

On February 15, the American Psychological Association (APA) Council of Representatives voted for a resolution opposing parental spanking (full disclosure: I serve on the APA Council of Representatives but speak only for myself). The resolution statement presented spanking research as if data conclusively links spanking to negative outcomes in children such as aggression or reduced intellectual development. I happen to do some research on spanking’s effects on children. Although I am by no means a spanking advocate, I was alarmed by the way an inconsistent, correlational, and methodologically weak research field that routinely produces weak effect sizes was mischaracterized as consistent and strong. Unfortunately, this resolution is part of a larger bias among professional guilds such as the APA, wherein messy science is laundered for public consumption, presenting it as more impressive than it actually is.

Many people in the general public believe that organizations such as the APA or American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) are neutral, objective scientific organizations or that they are even part of the government. But they are largely professional guilds wherein members like me pay dues to support their profession (both, but particularly the APA, are also publication houses). As a result, such organizations tend to market their fields much like any business markets its products. Impressive sounding science brings the field prestige, captures the attention of policy makers and helps members with grants, newspaper headlines, and career advancement. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and I certainly don’t wish to imply any bad faith. But failing to understand this basic fact may cause the general public to overestimate the degree of objectivity with which such organizations speak when talking about research.

There are good and honest arguments for why parents might choose other discipline strategies aside from spanking. Unfortunately, these were not arguments the APA made in the voted resolution. In a recent meta-analysis I conducted with several colleagues, we found that the effects of spanking on child aggression were so weak that they were best interpreted as negligible. Indeed, depending on how one looks at the data, it’s possible to make it look like spanking has either tiny negative or tiny positive impacts on children’s behavior.

Not all scholars agree with our assessment to be sure. But the argument that spanking correlates with child aggression (and the data is almost all correlational) mainly relies on effects that don’t control for other variables, such as the child’s pre-existing behavior problems (presumably misbehaving kids get spanked more) nor more serious forms of abuse. When studies do control for such factors, effect sizes become trivial, indeed about the same size as the impact of wearing eyeglasses on suicide. Naturally, we don’t warn parents about the public health risks of children’s eyeglasses because that would be silly. But the larger issue is not the tendency to pick sides in this debate, but that the APA is pretending that no debate exists at all.

A worthwhile discussion of a real problem.