Confirmation Bias is the Enemy of Truth

Thoughts on National Review's "Another Harvard Scandal Proves That Science Is Broken"

Jun 02, 2025

"Science is a bit like the joke about the drunk who is looking under a lamppost for a key that he has lost on the other side of the street, because that's where the light is. It has no other choice.”

Noam Chomsky

Until recently, Francesca Gino was a high-profile behavioral research scientist of full Professor rank at the esteemed Harvard Business School, serving as the endowed “Tandon Family Professor of Business Administration” and receiving more than $1 million in annual compensation— the university’s fifth-highest-paid employee in 2018 and 2019. Her core expertise and research subject matter involved Nudge technology and the reasons why people cheat.

She has earned major research awards from the National Science Foundation and the Academy of Management. Professor Gino’s research has been featured in leading scholarly journals in psychology and management, and in various popular media outlets, including the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, the Boston Globe, the Economist, Huffington Post, Newsweek, and Scientific American. She has appeared on CBS Radio and National Public Radio. She has consulted for some of the world's largest companies, including Goldman Sachs and Google.

And Harvard has recently taken the almost unheard-of action of revoking her tenure and firing her for (wait for it…) dishonesty and scientific fraud. I guess she took the aphorism “know thyself” a bit too literally.

The last time that Harvard revoked a professor’s tenure was in the 1940s.

Reports of academic fraud have become so common that they are akin to the famous “Dog Bites Man” example lede. In the land of the black pilled, academics, fraud, and grifting are assumed to be synonymous. But in his May 31 National Review essay titled “Another Harvard Scandal Proves That Science Is Broken”, author Andrew Follett dives deep under the surface of this widely reported story. He returns with insights that reflect and illuminate the darkest corners of both modern academia and the malaise afflicting western culture.

It all comes down to the mechanics of confirmation bias, how confirmation bias interacts with group dynamics - both inside and outside academia, and the practical “groupthink” consequences that arise from a lack of diverse, independent thought and opinion within a group (or culture).

Confirmation bias refers to the tendency of individuals to seek, interpret, and remember information in a way that confirms their pre-existing beliefs or values. This bias leads people to focus on evidence that supports their views while dismissing or undervaluing information that contradicts them. As a result, confirmation bias can create a distorted understanding of reality, reinforcing stereotypes and hindering effective communication in diverse settings.

Per Britannica:

The eight symptoms of groupthink include an illusion of invulnerability or of the inability to be wrong, the collective rationalization of the group’s decisions, an unquestioned belief in the morality of the group and its choices, stereotyping of the relevant opponents or out-group members, and the presence of “mindguards” who act as barriers to alternative or negative information, as well as self-censorship and an illusion of unanimity. Decision-making affected by groupthink neglects possible alternatives and focuses on a narrow number of goals, ignoring the risks involved in a particular decision. It fails to seek out alternative information and is biased in its consideration of that which is available. Once rejected, alternatives are forgotten, and little attention is paid to contingency plans in case the preferred solution fails.

Cause and consequence. Do you understand how confirmation bias and groupthink are interconnected?

Returning now to Andrew Follett’s analysis of the deeper implications of the Harvard/Francesca Gino fraud and grifting.

When independent bloggers and scientists looked at the data, it became clear that she was both exaggerating the size of “nudge” effects and outright fabricating any effect of nudges on behavior. Much of Gino’s research repeatedly tested a series of arbitrary data combinations until arriving at the desired statistical correlation she wanted to believe.
Specifically, Gino’s “research” was aligned with progressive assumptions about how the world works, stating that small “nudges,” such as putting the signature for an honesty pledge at the start of a form as opposed to its end, can alter human behavior in this case. This type of research was of great interest to the Obama administration, which weaponized it in an attempt to “improve” human behavior in accordance with its ideals. Attempts to change human nature in this manner have long been central to leftist politics.
Essentially, Gino was designing her studies to generate evidence for a belief favorable to progressives, which effectively ensured that very few in her elite left-wing circles questioned it. She was telling academia what it wanted to hear, so very few looked deeply into it, and instead widely cited it.

Out here in Rural America, we call this “Drinking your own Kool-Aid”, a not-so-subtle reference to the Jonestown Massacre. This organizational tendency is widely admonished in B-school jargon, which raises the question of whether Harvard’s own esteemed B-school is capable of practicing what it preaches.

Like Gino, any social scientist who wants an academic career has a very clear incentive to select only a study design or a dataset that is likely to generate results that are uncontroversial in academia. According to the Harvard Crimson, fewer than 3 percent of Harvard faculty members identify their personal political leanings as “conservative” or “very conservative,” while 32 percent identify as “very liberal” while another 45 percent identify as merely “liberal.” Any group politically polarized to this extent will have a difficult time arriving at the truth without injecting ideological bias, as the easiest way to advance is clearly to flatter the preconceptions of progressive faculty.
This creates a kind of ideological streetlight effect, in which researchers uncritically accept studies that favor their ideological preconceptions.

And therein lies the rub. The problem, dear Brutus, is that this phenomenon is not restricted to the “social sciences” (which increasingly seem to be anti-social, and most definitely non-scientific), but pervades the entire culture of modern academe, medicine (example to prove the point: the COVID crisis), and what is referred to as the “Deep State”.

Instead of taking the observations and teaching of Irving Janus and his insights to heart (see the classic 1972 study, Victims of Groupthink: A Psychological Study of Foreign-Policy Decisions and Fiascoes) and advancing methods to improve diversity of thought during decision making, Western academic and political culture has become amazingly intolerant of thought and speech that veers outside of the approved narratives or explanations.

As if this were not bad enough, as Follet points out, the pathway to promotion in academia and virtually all other aspects of modern Western culture is greased for those willing to endorse accepted norms. In the sciences, one rarely hears of testing hypotheses, let alone multiple alternative hypotheses. A form of intellectual degenerative brain syndrome, rooted in confirmation bias, has seemingly metastasized throughout the entire body of Western culture. We have become so obsessed with worshipping DEI policies based on race, sexual preferences, and class, that we have forgotten that “Think Different” was once the motto of innovators worldwide. We celebrate sexual fetishes and ethnic diversity while suppressing diversity of thought and speech in the name of “democracy”.

And by the way, “Thinking Different” is hard work. It should qualify as one of Mike Rowe’s “dirty jobs.”

Again returning to Andrew Follett:

Science is failing because of the strong incentives to lie to flatter progressive sensibilities. Work that flatters them advances and gets promoted in the media. Work that doesn’t is met with direct censorship by the powers that be in universities.
But it’s actually worse than that.
Most universities — including my own graduate alma mater of George Mason University, with its famously pro-free-market economics program — flat-out demand that potential scientists sign loyalty oaths to “anti-racism” as a condition of employment. Mason demands that “every member of our community” create “an inclusive and equitable campus environment in which every member of our community, without exception, is valued, supported, and experiences a sense of belonging” so that “George Mason University will become a national exemplar of anti-racism and inclusive excellence.”
Major scientific journals such as Nature openly refuse to publish politically incorrect ideas. Given the incredible pressure of the academic job market, these measures ensure that true inquiry is effectively impossible.
By definition, such motivated reasoning cannot be truly considered science, as it openly coerces prospective researchers not to investigate their chosen fields outside of strict political boundaries.

What Follett should be forgiven for missing is that this tendency is not restricted to Economics, Business Schools, or the Social Sciences, but has become a defining characteristic of modern Western thought. We have built our very own land of the blind. When I was a young University student in the 70s and 80s, it was not like this. We have been trained over the subsequent decades not to think independently. To become sycophants to authority. To value consensus and abhor dissent. So now we have arrived at a point where those industries that still value innovative disruption prefer to import foreign-trained minds over the domestic product being produced by our own academies.

Again and again, I see my more red and black pilled colleagues, who are among the remaining few that actively challenge approved narratives, intellectually reaching out to finger one or another “puppetmaster” to pin the blame for these trends. These poor souls who just cannot get on the Kumbaya Kool-Aid-quaffing bandwagon are derisively and demeaningly referred to as “conspiracy theorists,” but from my one-eyed perspective, they are often the most enjoyable intellectual companions because they seem to be the only ones able to think for themselves. I just relabel their “conspiracy theories” as “hypotheses,” and try to think about what actual evidence exists to support or refute their non-approved insights. Always keeping in mind my belief that there is a higher power overseeing all of this, and that “Truth” often transcends that which can be measured and quantified using current tech (including restricted human senses).

But what my red-black pilled colleagues often overlook is the power of consensus narratives. Once a worldview or explanation takes root in a culture, it becomes both remarkably self-reinforcing and resistant to change, and in turn, organically drives the interpretation of adjacent ideas and phenomena. The narrative of human-caused global climate change has become so widely accepted that it no longer requires a hidden hand. A decentralized nearly unanimous army of true believers police that domain. The culture becomes invested in the falsehood, and prefers censorship to questioning. Likewise “all vaccines are safe and effective”. On and on, you get the point. When we stop valuing independent thought, we build our own mental prison. And as diversity of thought and speech dies, it murders innovation on the way to the grave.

Fortunately or unfortunately, Harvard University has developed into a mass murderer of intellectual diversity. Perhaps it is a good thing that it seems to have dedicated itself to training the elite and wealthy of our adversaries. Perhaps all of this will be self-correcting over a long enough time frame.

I am not Nostradamus, and do not aspire to becoming a fortune teller. But what I do have confidence in is that those best able to survive the coming tidal wave of disruption will be the ones with a broad skill set and an agile mind. And that I personally prefer the company of free thinkers, even if they can be prone to obsessing their way down various conspiratorial, libertarian, or occasionally fact-free rabbit holes.

In contrast, “Nudge” technology, social engineering, and modern “PsyWar” in general all act to destroy diversity of thought and promote both consensus and confirmation bias. And, if the case of Professor Francesca Gino is any indicator, the foundations of these disciplines are built on sand.

What I do know with absolute confidence is that “science”, whether social, physical, or political, is best approached with an open, curious mind. And that Nudge and PsyWar technology, coerced consensus, and confirmation bias are the enemies of truth.

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