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.
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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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”:
The findings reveal how white ignorance as a macrosystemic cultural practice becomes embedded in, and strengthened through, the micro-level racial identities of white adolescents.
They elaborated further:
White ignorance is an epistemic practice rooted in histories of racial domination and violence, which continually serves to disregard and dehumanize people of color by holding white supremacy in place. In the present study, we name and show how white children's racial development is intertwined with white ignorance…Moving forward…it is imperative that we reimagine and divorce what it means to be(come) white from the confines of white ignorance and white supremacy, only then might we move resistance from the periphery to the center in white adolescents' emerging racial identities.
One might argue that researchers are entitled to interpret participants’ responses through their own theoretical frameworks. But that defense fails when the research is disingenuous from the outset. These interviews were never meant to be a neutral inquiry—they were a setup. The researchers had no intention of discovering anything other than “white ignorance” and “white supremacy.” They admit as much:
Importantly, the aim of the present analysis was not to test or “prove” whether white ignorance exists; rather our analysis starts from the macrosystem of white supremacy and asks how and in what ways white ignorance shows up in white adolescents’ developing racial identities.
I highlight this study not because it is a rare outlier, but because it represents a growing trend. Increasingly, I see—though I have not yet formally quantified—a rise in interview, survey, and focus group studies that reflect not just the intellectual rot in academia, but also a troubling exploitation of research participants. Individuals who participate in these studies are being used as props to confirm woke researchers’ ideological priors. Their views are distorted and reinterpreted to serve a predetermined narrative.
This pattern is especially pronounced in journals with feminist or critical theory leanings, where the commitment to activism often seems to outweigh any genuine interest in understanding the people being studied.
Another revealing example comes from a recent interview study conducted by Connor MacMillan of York University and the Collaborative for Racial Justice.
Published in the journal Men and Masculinities, MacMillan’s paper is titled “When Men Seek Support and Comradery: Fathers’ Rights Groups and the Complexities of Manhood.”
To recruit participants, MacMillan posted advertisements on social media platforms such as Facebook, ultimately interviewing 14 men involved in fathers’ rights groups. Participants were asked two questions:
Why do men join [Fathers’ Rights Groups], and what do these men perceive that they gain as a result of belonging to such a group?
How do [Fathers’ Rights Groups] socialize men to uphold anti-feminist beliefs and rhetoric?
The men gave honest, heartfelt responses. One father, for instance, offered this reflection on how the dominant cultural narrative of “male privilege” did not match his personal experience:
We are told that we are entitled, that everything is easier for men and yet, there is like an actual real-life experience that is completely opposite to that […] As a man you are always told how you have more chances, everything is based on the patriarchy that has been created for men to keep men in power… push women to the bottom. I have not experienced that at all… I feel like we are completely powerless.
Others emphasized the emotional importance of these groups in their lives:
You know it is that emotional support that is really important, that place to connect with men, where they don’t feel judged and just feel safe to talk about whatever.
It is great that you can sit down and have a group of friends […] where you can actually know it is a safe environment and talk about what is going on.
Hearing from other people, other men, just hearing their stories. Knowing you are not alone, the connection aspect of it…
You actually get to interact with people who have been through the same thing as you and understand. Unless you have actually experienced it no one can even imagine the depth of despair and hopelessness and powerlessness that modern men experience. The men’s groups give you value. Everything else is taken away from you on every level of your life, but there someone actually listens to you.
Sadly, just like the white adolescents in Dull’s study on “white ignorance,” these fathers were never given a fair chance to have their views taken seriously. Instead of analyzing the interviews inductively—letting themes emerge organically from participants’ words—MacMillan began with feminist theoretical assumptions and forced the fathers’ testimonies into that framework. He acknowledged this explicitly: “I applied a feminist epistemological lens to analyse and make meaning of these data…”
That “lens” produced a striking lack of empathy and led to conclusions that pathologized the very men who had opened up to him in good faith. MacMillan wrote:
[T]hese groups perpetuate a form of backlash against women and feminist movements in which they attempt to position men as socially oppressed because of women’s adversarial patriarchal dominance.
[Father’s Rights Groups’] rhetoric blames women for men’s unpleasant experiences, and it fosters a belief in the righteousness of hegemonic masculinity and men’s entitlement to power and control.
The fathers had made themselves vulnerable, sharing deeply personal accounts of powerlessness, alienation, and emotional pain. But rather than honoring that vulnerability, MacMillan repurposed it as ideological ammunition. It’s no wonder so many men are hesitant to open up to psychologists!
An important aside about MacMillan’s paper is that includes no statements regarding ethics approval or informed consent—standard requirements for any published research involving human participants. Curious about this omission, I contacted the relevant university ethics board and eventually confirmed that the study had received ethics approval. Nonetheless, the absence of this information in the paper illustrates the multiple layers of carelessness and incompetence that were involved in the paper being published. From the author, to the peer reviewers, to the journal editors, to the publisher’s copyediting team, no one caught the error—despite the publisher’s own guidelines explicitly stating that ethics approval and informed consent disclosures must be included.
This collective failure—compounded by ideological bias—captures the state of academic peer review today: careless, politicized, and increasingly indifferent to both scholarly standards and the dignity of research participants.
The “studies” by Dull and MacMillan illustrate a broader problem in modern academic research: participants’ responses are routinely twisted to fit the ideological biases of the researchers. But the problem goes even deeper in survey-based research, where the bias is often embedded directly into the design of the questionnaires themselves. Two prime examples of this are the Male Privilege Awareness Scale and the Toxic Masculinity Scale.
The Male Privilege Awareness Scale was introduced in Psychology of Women Quarterly in 2007. It consists of seven items, each rated on a 7-point Likert scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree). The items include:
Men have privileges that women do not have in the United States.
Men automatically have more opportunities than women in employment and education.
Women are disadvantaged in society and men are at an advantage.
Men are at an advantage because they hold most of the positions of power in society.
Men must be willing to give up their privileged status before men and women can be truly equal.
Women and men have equal chances at success in this country. (Reverse scored)
Women are advantaged and men are currently at a disadvantage. (Reverse scored)
This scale starts from a false premise that men are inherently privileged across all dimensions of society. If a respondent disagrees—perhaps because they recognize areas where men face disadvantage—their answers are simply interpreted as a lack of “awareness.” In other words, the only valid responses are those that affirm the researcher’s worldview. Disagreement becomes a diagnostic category rather than a legitimate perspective.
The situation is made worse by how such tools are used. The Male Privilege Awareness Scale is now being applied to studies of the so-called “manosphere,” with researchers implying that men who do not answer the scale’s questions in accordance with feminist bias are sexist.
A similar problem plagues the Toxic Masculinity Scale,1 a 28-item questionnaire scored on a 5-point Likert scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). Like the previous scale, it codes dissent from progressive orthodoxy as a psychological flaw. For example, if a participant agrees with statements like “There is no such thing as male privilege” or “If I don’t feel well, I just ignore it,” they are flagged as scoring high in toxic masculinity. Likewise, disagreement with statements such as “Gender and sex are the same thing” is treated as further evidence of toxicity.
Beyond their ideological slant, these tools also suffer from circular validation methods. Researchers often “validate” a new scale by comparing it to others that share the same ideological premises. Not surprisingly, scores on similarly biased instruments tend to correlate. This correlation is then cited as evidence that the new scale is valid and meaningful. For instance, the Toxic Masculinity Scale was validated using the Liberal Feminist Attitude and Ideology Scale—a move that simply reinforces a closed feedback loop of ideological reinforcement, not scientific rigor.
Some may argue that as long as researchers obtain informed consent from participants, they are entitled to interpret interview and focus group responses however they choose. After all, they might point out, deception has long been used in psychological research under certain circumstances. But this comparison is unconvincing.
In psychology, deception is sometimes employed when concealing the true purpose of a study is necessary to test a specific hypothesis or to measure a psychological construct without biasing participants. Even in such cases, the researcher is still bound by the study’s design and the obligation to assess whether the results support the hypothesis. Crucially, participants are debriefed after the study concludes, restoring transparency.
The situation with researchers like Dull and MacMillan is fundamentally different. They are not testing hypotheses, measuring causal mechanisms, or objectively exploring descriptive data. Their conclusions are already decided before data collection even begins—for example, that white adolescents are ignorant of their racism or that men in fathers’ groups are misled and complicit in upholding patriarchy. The “research” is simply a vehicle to reaffirm these predetermined ideological beliefs.
Because their conclusions are known in advance, there is no legitimate scientific justification for conducting the research at all. These woke researchers are therefore wasting public funds, misusing the time and trust of participants, and, more seriously, violating a core ethical principle of human subjects research: do not expose participants to unnecessary risk of harm—emotional or otherwise.2
In this case, the harm is unnecessary precisely because it serves no empirical purpose. The researchers would have reached the same conclusions regardless of how participants responded. That makes the entire exercise ethically indefensible.
One consequence of these biased research practices is that certain groups—particularly those most likely to be misrepresented—may stop volunteering for studies altogether. This creates skewed samples and further undermines the reliability of social science research. For example, one consistent finding in the literature on research volunteerism is that males are less likely than females to take part in survey research. Given that many of the issues described above stem, in large part, from feminist academics and their intersectional allies, male participation in future surveys, interviews, and focus groups is likely to decline even further.
Compounding the problem is the lingering prestige associated with academic journals. When university media teams or journalists report on findings from these ideologically driven studies, they often assume—incorrectly—that the research was conducted according to rigorous scientific standards and that the peer review process provided objective quality control. In reality, the continued publication of such work reveals a deeply compromised peer review system, one increasingly shaped by ideological conformity and lacking meaningful intellectual diversity.
The only real solution to this problem is to confront and correct the intellectual rot that has taken root in the academy. Unfortunately, this rot is deeply entrenched and institutionally reinforced, making swift reform unlikely. Still, any effort to restore integrity to academic research is worthwhile. Right now, universities are producing a generation of scholars who are not only ideologically compromised, but also intellectually unprepared to engage with the world honestly and rigorously.
These researchers are meant to be stewards of one of humanity’s highest callings: the pursuit of truth and the advancement of knowledge. Yet instead of honoring that responsibility, they handle it carelessly, bending it to serve short-term political goals and, in doing so, eroding both public trust and academic integrity. Knowledge—and the rigorous methods used to produce it—is worth defending. It is, in the end, one of the most precious things we have.
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Footnotes
1 For a critical discussion of The Toxic Masculinity Scale, see this discussion between Dr. Nuzzo and Tom Golden at Men are Good on Substack.
2 Personally, I think the concerns of ethics boards about “emotional harms” from survey, interview, and focus group research are often excessive. Here, I am simply pointing out that Woke researchers are violating tenets of the research communities that they work within.
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tl;dnr because after the first example it only reaffirmed my utter contempt for and distrust of everything in the social 'sciences' within the decaying halls of academia.
I have not read this piece, and already choose to comment: I don't think an academic journal should accept a piece with "White ignorance" in the title (or the text), at least not as used in this case.