Reposted by Pat Savage
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@aiyanakoka.bsky.social Meara Geraty and I revisited religious priming, breaking the causal claim into links that we robustly tested.
Do God Primes Prime God? Converging Evidence Against the Efficacy of Experimental Religious Priming osf.io/preprints/ps...
#PsychSciSky #metascience
![For all his complaining about autoethnography, his report is utterly dependent on it. He begins the report with a story about his arrival at UCLA in 1993, along with an autoethnographic accounting of his intellectual journey from cultural to biological anthropology. His analysis is, to quote a critic of autoethnography, one in which he “take[s] a central role…in a narrative of struggle and suffering as [he] confronts the challenges of life” (Henrich pg. 37-38). It’s just that rather than emphasizing “the experience of racism, sexism, capitalist exploitation and othering” (pg. 37-38), he instead emphasizes the experiences of ideological pressure, professional intimidation, and the marginalization of dissenters in the discipline (of which he is apparently one). He bases his understanding of the biological/cultural split in some departments almost entirely on his own experiences in two different departments at elite private schools. There really is no attempt to be systematic and rigorous in his analysis of those events in a broader, more general way than what he and his friends experienced.
Throughout the report, he explicitly states his own positionality as exactly the kind of credence-lending thing he rebukes when others do it. “My immersion in these other disciplines, which includes earning tenure and promotion to full professor, gives me a unique perspective on Anthropology” (pg. 3) may as well have been phrased, “as an anthropologist myself…” This is precisely the kind of work autoethnography and reflexive positioning does, but I guess it’s only verboten when it is Others positioning themselves in relation to structures of oppression. In his case, it’s just adding context and is totally apolitical!
At the top of pg. 39, Henrich quotes Susan Pickard’s critique of autoethnography:
What distinguishes self-expression from scholarship? What are the limits of subjectivity as data? What about distortion, selective seeing, the dangers of solipsism? The speakers were a…](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:mm4ujzh5bqccjs7g2oerjemp/bafkreihucz7n2gdl5g2x256n4m4s3oviru3ts5qm4pg5blz3txk6r5jw7u)
![Abstract including "Results showed large cultural differences (d = 3.98 [2.50, 5.43]) that were previously obscured by flawed measurement."](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:mm4ujzh5bqccjs7g2oerjemp/bafkreibadizyerar7ot2lfuvxhhnhlfvenakahhk3yvjip6gbwbbfepu24)
![Paper text includes more nuance "For example, the responsibilism scale found large differences between East Asian and Western cultures, t(22) = 8.87, P < 0.001, Cohen’s d = 3.98, 95% CI [2.50, 5.43] (Fig. 3)."](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:mm4ujzh5bqccjs7g2oerjemp/bafkreihme3glmzceojadrdcdnsoyclm7f65oykudsy3lwj36cmqd6xaaee)
![Boghossian et al.’s (2026) critique of humanistic scholarship is itself bad scholarship and should be corrected or retracted
Patrick E. Savage1,2
1School of Psychology, Waipapa Taumata Rau | University of Auckland, Aotearoa | New Zealand
2Faculty of Environment and Information Studies, Keio University, Fujisawa, Japan
[This version dated August 28, 2026]
Abstract: Boghossian et al.’s (2026) “Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences” argues that humanistic scholarship has experienced “a deterioration in scholarly standards fueled by the substitution of political criteria for properly scholarly criteria”. I argue that their report itself represents low scholarly standards. Specifically: 1) it is primarily based on unpublished, unverifiable data; 2) the limited data that have been published (largely from unvalidated LLM categorisations) do not support the main claims of a “deterioriation in scholary standards”; and 3) the report unjustifiably generalises from a narrow set of examples (e.g., the cancelation of a panel on sex and gender by the American Anthropological Association) to make sweeping conclusions about global humanities scholarship. I describe counter-examples from past and present research in the humanities and the sciences by myself and others to show that biased and low-quality scholarship is not a new or unique problem for progressive humanistic research. While I agree with the authors that critical evaluation of the quality of academic scholarship (both humanistic and scientific) is urgently needed in today’s global political climate, the report’s strongest conclusions are not justified by their data and thus are not of sufficient quality to achieve their intended goal of helping university leaders to make policy decisions. I recommend it be corrected or retracted to resolve these issues.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:mm4ujzh5bqccjs7g2oerjemp/bafkreiduoolgtplrn2xadbszoticx6en5ojq4mmdyrhjvef74pw2lmzsku)
