Positionality Statements
Discusison
DORIAN ABBOT:
"Positionality statements are a flagrant violation of one of the key Mertonian Norms of science, universalism, which states that “scientific validity is independent of the sociopolitical status/personal attributes of its participants.” They are not just political grandstanding, which is bad enough, but actually act to undermine the ideal of the disinterested collection of evidence and development of explanatory theories by the scientific method, and therefore decrease confidence in scientific results. In science, it doesn’t matter if your father was a prince or pauper, what you look like, where you came from, or what naughty stuff you do with whom. Science is science, data are data, and bullshit is bullshit. In order to preserve the integrity of the scientific process, journals should ban positionality statements, and we, as reviewers, should automatically reject any paper that includes them.>