Braun Tibor, Schubert András (szerk.): Szakértői bírálat (peer review) a tudományos kutatásban : Válogatott tanulmányok a téma szakirodalmából (A MTAK Informatikai És Tudományelemzési Sorozata 7., 1993)
IAN I. MITROFF and DARYL E. CHUBIN: Peer Review at the NSF: A Dialectical Policy Analysis
126 MITROFF & CHUBIN: PEER REVIEW AT THE NSF to have no effect on the operation of the system — or, at the very least, on their beliefs about the system? Indeed, the question that now emerges is whether scientists differ systematically by discipline, institution, or research area in their beliefs of the presence or absence of bias in the system. This question fuels speculation on the relation between individual and social (systemic) innovativeness hypothesized earlier: Are individuals whose cognitive-style betrays a high propensity to innovate viewed as such by their colleagues? Does this research in fact reflect their innovativeness? Furthermore, do these innovators communicate more frequently with other innovators, and in this sense nurture one another? Finally, and most importantly, are innovators located in greater or lesser abundance at prestigious institutions? The evidence that élite scientists tend to associate and communicate with other élite scientists more frequently than they do with non-élites, and that elite scientists tend to be affiliated with elite institutions, 6 7 would suggest that an examination of the interplay of psychological, intellectual and social factors operating in the peer review process is in order. Above all, if sustained innovativeness and éliteness go hand in hand, the concentration of innovative ideas and high quality research proposals submitted by those in a select pool of institutions would need no remedy. However, the distribution of high innovators in the scientific community (as well as in the subpopulation of applicants for NSF funds) is unknown. This missing link in the debate — a control variable, if you will — signals a need to measure the cognitive styles and background beliefs of participants in the peer review process before one can interpret either (1) the meaning of responses to a survey such as Hensler's, or (2) a quantitative analysis (such as Cole's) which sacrifices qualitative insights into individual differences for statistical significance. Finding this missing link is all the more necessary given Mitroff's findings from his Apollo moon study. 68 Nearly all of his scientists were extremely sceptical of the conventional portrait of the scientist as a neutral, unbiased, objective observer of nature. Moreover, the overwhelming majority of those interviewed gave revealing reasons for why they thought scientists in their role as scientists should not be entirely unbiased. The majority view was that it was necessary for scientists to act as partisan advocates for their hypotheses and theories lest those theories suffer a premature death. This means not that these scientists
