Should Scientists Be Activists?

It Depends on What You Mean by the Question

“I may be in the minority, but I do not think scientists should be activists. I think scientists should present objective data to politicians and let them decide what to do with it.”

–Nate Honeycutt, at the 2026 SPSP Conference

At our Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) symposium titled “Is SPSP a Healthy Organization,” we received a lot of thoughtful and intelligent questions. Perhaps the most common theme of those questions centered around political activism – to what degree is it ok for scientists to engage in politics? Should scientists be completely removed from politics? Should scientists ever be activists?

Nate Honeycutt says no, they shouldn’t. Many of the SPSP crowd think they should.

So should scientists ever be activists? Let’s discuss.

The Answer Depends On What You Mean by the Question

When this question came up at SPSP, I gave this astonishingly embarrassing answer: “I can see both sides of this. It will say on my tombstone, ‘This man was paralyzed by complexity.’”

That answer was…less helpful…than Nate’s clear, well-articulated statement.

But I really did have an actual thought behind that weird comment about my tombstone, and it is this. I think it is ok for scientists to be animated by progressive activism to do science. So if the question is “Can I use my political ideals to generate hypotheses to test?” then the answer has to be “absolutely, go for it.” But I don’t think it is ok for scientists to use a progressive (or any other political) standard in place of a scientific one in making judgments about what is true. So if the question is “should my primary aim in running a study be to further an activist cause?” then the answer has to be “no, under no circumstances.” Because the primary aim of any scientific study is to find out the truth.

In the end, as you’ll see, I completely agree with Nate’s opening statement about the proper relationship of science to political activism. I just think it is important to clarify what this does and doesn’t mean.

Let’s start with the “yes” side of things.

Activism Can Animate Good Research Ideas

Years ago, one of my favorite social psychologist colleagues pointed out – in response to some of our criticisms of an over-politicized science – that progressive politics can animate good research ideas. I thought then, and think now, that he was right about that.

So I want to be clear: I have no desire whatsoever to remove progressive research from the scientific table en masse. I think progressive activist ideas can provide fodder for scientific inquiry. Progressive scientists using progressive activist ideals to generate ideas to test is not merely legitimate to me; it is desirable.

Why? Well, for starters, it is literally impossible to do anything else as a human being.

Everyone brings pre-scientific ideas to the scientific table from their own experiences, perspectives, and beliefs. Research on the Bystander Effect emerged because of researchers’ reactions to the Kitty Genovese murder. Research on Basking in Reflected Glory emerged because of a researcher’s reactions to a college football game. Research on obedience emerged because of a researcher’s reactions to the atrocities of Nazi Germany. Each of those researchers had pre-scientific beliefs that met their own experiences. To suggest that political activists should not use their own combination of pre-scientific beliefs and experiences to produce scientific ideas would be, to me, as silly as suggesting that Bob Cialdini should not have tested any ideas that came from an Ohio State football game. Any source can produce potentially good scientific ideas.

I have run an undergraduate lab for 25 years. When I first started doing political psychology, I used to tell my lab RAs the following thing in my opening lab meeting:

“The lab has no political agenda. Our only agenda is the truth.”

But at some point, I realized this was a bit disingenuous. Because some of my own ideas were animated by pre-scientific political beliefs (some liberal, some conservative), it turned out to be not entirely true that we had no agenda at all. So I don’t say it quite like that anymore. (What I do say we will cover a bit later.)

So I think it is kind of inevitable that all of our beliefs (activist or otherwise) will influence our theory-building and hypothesis-generation. Also, I think we need progressive ideas specifically because they have a lot to (potentially) contribute to any behavioral science enterprise. In my most recent paper on Islamophobia, I said this about progressive science:

“Lovett (2025) notes that progressive scientists ‘argue that psychological research should address a different set of biases, ones that are associated with social identity: racism sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, and the like. One way of interpreting this argument is that psychology should be trying to reduce such biases in society at large.’ On the surface, this culture is not incompatible with science, and in fact could animate a better understanding of global psychology by removing bias and leading to better truth claims (see Lovett, 2025, for an excellent analysis). And indeed, in its original instantiation, it likely did just that. For example, when Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke at the Society for the Psychological Study for Social Issues (SPSSI) – long the standard-bearer for progressive approaches to science – conference in 1967, he encouraged psychologists to actively play a role in civil rights, primarily by “educating White Americans about the reality of Black Americans’ lives” (quoted in Lovett, 2025). That is actually very Baconian in nature: Use science to uncover the reality that goes beyond a single culture’s experience.”

My point is, progressive scientific assumptions can help generate hypotheses that lead us to valuable truths.

My problem with progressive science is not that it is progressive and it is science. My problem is that it often seeks to be exclusionary. For example, everything I’ve said so far would also apply to Christianity and science. Indeed, the relationship between progressive activism and science is (in many respects) identical to the relationship of my Christian faith to science. Christianity can (and should) be used to generate hypotheses, just like progressivism can (and should) be used to generate hypotheses. In fact, put almost anything in this box – [X] can be used to generate hypotheses for science – and it likely applies.

Right now, we don’t have a progressive science problem so much as we have a balance problem. Conservative ideals can also be used to generate useful hypotheses, but we have almost no conservatives in the field. So what we really need is not fewer progressive scientists. What we need are more scientists from other areas, to provide useful ideas from those areas.

But absolutely, progressive activism can produce potentially useful scientific ideas.

Activism Cannot Be the Ultimate Standard of Judgment

However, under no circumstances can activism be allowed to become our standard of judgment. Ultimately, any source can produce scientific ideas. But only reasonable empirical standards of judgment can determine if those ideas are true.

Over my time in social psychology, I have observed a lot of scientific studies that cast my Christian faith in a less-than-positive light. Rarely have I cared enough to do research to push back against these studies (I generally find the psychology of religion quite boring as a research topic). But twice I have run sets of studies, based on my pre-scientific experiences and beliefs, to try and overturn (what I believed to be) false statements about people who share my religion. One of those instances involved the assertion that Christianity tended to produce simple-minded people. This attempt at scientifically challenging the status quo went exceedingly well for me. As illustrated in our lab’s subsequent empirical research and summarized in my book Complex Simplicity, I think the anti-Christian assertion is demonstrably false: Christians (if anything) are more complex than other sorts of persons.

The other instance did not go nearly so well. I thought Christian fundamentalists were getting a bad rap by basically being depicted as jerky war hawks, so I ran a series of studies to give them every chance to look less like hypocritical war-supporters. The studies’ results were messy; but overall, despite trying very, very hard to make Christian fundamentalists look good, my work still showed them to look kind of like jerks. While I deemed the data to be unpublishable (they were too messy by the standards of the day – believe me, I would have published them if I thought I could have), I did present them at a conference:

Conway, L. G., III. (2007, July). Right-wing authoritarianism, fundamentalism, and peaceableness. Paper presented at the 30th Annual Meeting of the International Society of Political Psychology, Portland, USA.

My point in sharing these stories is two-fold. First, I think we tend to overweigh the value of a particular study to a larger cause or belief system; and it might help us feel less attached to the outcomes of studies (and more to the truth) if we stopped doing that. (The relationship between specific meta-theories and specific hypotheses is more complex than I’m discussing here and might be worth another post on its own; but at the moment, I want to focus on the simpler story). For example, do not imagine that in testing these scientific ideas derived from my own experiences with Christianity, that I believed I was testing Christianity. My pre-scientific beliefs about God are far, far more important to me – and far larger and expansive – than any specific scientific study. As a parallel, progressive activists do not (necessarily) need to give up their progressive activism merely because some of the psychological tests derived from their theories did not look like they thought they would. It is fine to have pre-scientific beliefs that, as an individual person, are more important to you than science. Most scientists value non-scientific things – their children, their family, their faith, their friends, their politics – more than they value the outcome of a scientific study. Although we should of course alter our views based on empirical facts, these background values themselves need not be threatened by the outcomes of specific hypotheses derived from (but not the same as) those value assumptions.

Second, what we should undoubtedly change when a study doesn’t go our way is our view of the facts surrounding that specific hypothesis. Even if the data don’t look like what we expected or wanted, we are ultimately obligated to the truth of those data. My own pre-scientific assumptions led me to expect outcomes in each case. For the first one, my expectations were met. For the second one, my expectations were not. But regardless of that, in a scientific arena, we are obligated to judge the outcome by a scientific standard. The truth of what happened is, ultimately, our only barometer. If your progressive ideals animate some study hypotheses, good and well. But if those hypotheses prove false, you have an obligation to accept that and report it.

Concluding Thoughts

While I no longer act like my ideas are somehow entirely devoid of pre-scientific politics, I do still strongly believe that ultimately, science is about truth-finding – or nothing. In fact, my new opening lab meeting introduction goes something like this:

“I used to say that the lab had no agenda, but that isn’t technically true. While most of our studies are not especially political in nature. some of the ideas we test were designed with a political goal in mind. This means that you may be working on a project with a political goal – a goal you may or may not approve of. But here’s the thing. The general outlook of the lab is that political psychology ought to be a science that is as independent of those positions as possible, whatever we thought might happen going in. I am interested in the facts relevant to how people think about all things political; I do not think it is good science to determine a particular conclusion about those facts beforehand (otherwise known as a political “agenda”) and then force those facts to fit that conclusion. I think the relationship between science and political platforms ought to go largely from the facts to the platforms, not the other way around. For all of us, in a sense, our political pre-conceptions are obstacles to our scientific quest for knowledge that we need to overcome – biases to remove – and not the goal of the lab.”

So, you see, ultimately I think Nate is right. If all we have to contribute to the world is progressive activism, then we aren’t scientists. What proper science has to contribute to political discourse is precisely the opposite of that: It is to provide facts that are, in the final and most important sense, independent of politics. They are not independent in that they are never animated by political ideals. They are independent in that, however they were animated, they are judged by non-political criteria based in science.

If we are unwilling or unable to do that, then we should stop calling ourselves scientists and become yet another political organization. If we follow that political road, more’s the pity. The world’s got plenty of politics; but it sure could use some objective science right now.