The Woke Capture of Developmental Psychopathology
A warning about what happens when a field stop prioritizing truth.
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About the Author
Dr. Colin Wright is an evolutionary biology PhD, Manhattan Institute Fellow, and CEO/Editor-in-Chief of Reality’s Last Stand. His writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Times, the New York Post, Newsweek, City Journal, Quillette, The Washington Examiner, and other major news outlets and scientific journals.
Over the last decade, it’s become normal to hear academics say things like “science is political,” that objectivity is impossible, and that the purpose of scholarship isn’t just to understand the world but to “change” it. That might sound nice, since most people like scientific breakthroughs that improve our lives. The problem is what happens when moral urgency begins to replace logic and evidence. That is, when ought gets prioritized over is. When emotions and politics take precedence, the range of permissible questions and answers shrinks. Certain hypotheses become off-limits, not because they’ve been tested and falsified, but because they’re seen as morally taboo. Over time, the construction of too many moral guardrails can make entire fields incapable of investigating a claim objectively.
That’s the concern John D. Haltigan—an evolutionary and developmental psychopathologist at the Centre for Heterodox Social Science at the University of Buckingham—takes up in his new Theory and Society article, “Retrospect & prospect: a post-progressive developmental evolutionary psychopathology.” In it, he claims that developmental psychopathology, a field designed to integrate biological, psychological, and social explanations of mental disorder across a person’s life, has been corrupted by what he calls “a significant ideological distortion,” driven by progressive social-justice norms that have embedded themselves in the scientific process.
