Mertonian Norms

From Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth by Stuart Ritchie.  Page 21.

The above summary is all too brief and general, but essentially every scientific field follows that process in some form. We might ask ourselves whether, after being put through the mangle of peer review, the eventual publication still provides a faithful representation of what was done in the study. We’ll get to that in later chapters. For now, we need to consider something else. What ensures that the participants in the process just described – the researcher who submits the paper, the editor at the journal, the peers who review it – all conduct themselves with the honesty and integrity that trustworthy science requires? There’s no law requiring that everyone acts fairly and rationally when evaluating science, so what’s needed is a shared ethos, a set of values that aligns the scientists’ behaviour. The best-known attempt to write down these unwritten rules is that of the sociologist Robert Merton.
 
In 1942, Merton set out four scientific values, now known as the ‘Mertonian Norms’. None of them have snappy names, but all of them are good aspirations for scientists. First, universalism: scientific knowledge is scientific knowledge, no matter who comes up with it – so long as their methods for finding “finding that knowledge are sound. The race, sex, age, gender, sexuality, income, social background, nationality, popularity, or any other status of a scientist should have no bearing on how their factual claims are assessed. You also can’t judge someone’s research based on what a pleasant or unpleasant person they are – which should come as a relief for some of my more disagreeable colleagues. Second, and relatedly, disinterestedness: scientists aren’t in it for the money, for political or ideological reasons, or to enhance their own ego or reputation (or the reputation of their university, country, or anything else). They’re in it to advance our understanding of the universe by discovering things and making things – full stop.  As Charles Darwin once wrote, a scientist ‘ought to have no wishes, no affections, – a mere heart of stone.’
 
The next two norms remind us of the social nature of science. The third is communality: scientists should share knowledge with each other.  This principle underlies the whole idea of publishing your results in a journal for others to see – we’re all in this together; we have to know the details of other scientists’ work so that we can assess and build “on it.  Lastly, there’s organised scepticism: nothing is sacred, and a scientific claim should never be accepted at face value. We should suspend judgement on any given finding until we’ve properly checked all the data and methodology. The most obvious embodiment of the norm of organised scepticism is peer review itself.