Woke Academics Are Rigging Research Methods To Support Their Ideology

Starting with the conclusion and working backward to support it betrays both science and its subjects.

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About the Author

James L. Nuzzo, PhD, is an exercise scientist and men’s health researcher. Dr. Nuzzo has published over 80 research articles in peer-reviewed journals. He writes regularly about exercise, men’s health, and academia at The Nuzzo Letter on Substack. Dr. Nuzzo is also active on X @JamesLNuzzo.

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A growing number of academic studies no longer aim to explore open questions, but instead begin with ideological conclusions and then work backwards. Nowhere is this more evident than in research on race, gender, and identity—where scholars increasingly interpret participants’ responses not on their own terms, but through the lens of critical theory or feminist ideology.

Rather than asking what people believe or experience, many researchers start from the assumption that concepts like white supremacy or male privilege are everywhere—and then frame any disagreement or nuance as evidence of ignorance, denial, or oppression. This not only undermines the scientific process, but also exploits participants who engage in good faith, sharing personal stories only to have them distorted to support a predetermined narrative.

Here, I examine several recent examples of this trend. These include an NIH-funded study in which white adolescents’ rejection of racism was reframed as “white ignorance,” and a paper that dismissed vulnerable fathers as perpetrators of “hegemonic masculinity.” Such studies don’t just misrepresent their subjects—they erode public trust in research, violate basic ethical standards, and reflect a deeper corruption at the heart of modern academia.

Earlier this year, a group of researchers, led by Brandon Dull at the University Chicago, published a paper in the journal Child Development titled, “Learning (Not) to Know: Examining How White Ignorance Manifests and Functions in White Adolescents’ Racial Identity Narratives.”

Funded by a National Institutes of Health (NIH) R01 project grant, the study set out to explore the question: “How do white adolescents demonstrate and engage with (via accommodation and resistance) white ignorance in their racial identity narratives?”

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🎧 Prefer to listen?

Watch or listen to a full breakdown of this paper by evolutionary biologist Dr. Colin Wright and journalist Brad Polumbo on the latest episode of the Citation Needed podcast.

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To investigate this, the researchers conducted semi-structured interviews with 69 white adolescents—26 male and 43 female—in the Midwestern United States. Participants were asked questions such as:

• “What are some of the good things about being white?”

• “What are some of the things that are hard about being white?”

• “Can you think of a time when you were treated differently because of your race?”

• “Do you ever feel like people expect you to act a certain way or do certain things just because you are white?”

The study published only a handful of the students’ responses. Here are two examples:

I don’t, I don’t see anybody else as different like at all. Like I don’t really care what your skin, what your race is like you’re still the same person on the inside even if you look different on the outside…

I think people always think of white people as being more racist. Like I like a lot of people so it’s like somebody calling me a racist is not correct.

These responses are striking not for their bigotry, but for their total absence of it. The adolescents rejected racial prejudice and expressed a desire to treat others as individuals. This would ordinarily be seen as a positive result. Yet rather than acknowledging this, the researchers concluded that the students were exhibiting “White ignorance”: