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Social behavioural epistemology and the scientific community

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Abstract

The progress of science is influenced substantially by social behaviour of and social interactions within the scientific community. Similar to innovations in primate groups, the social acceptance of an innovation depends not only upon the relevance of the innovation but also on the social dominance and connectedness of the innovator. There are a number of parallels between many well-known phenomena in behavioural evolution and various behavioural traits observed in the scientific community. It would be useful, therefore, to use principles of behavioural evolution as hypotheses to study the social behaviour of the scientific community. I argue in this paper that a systematic study of social behavioural epistemology is likely to boost the progress of science by addressing several prevalent biases and other problems in scientific communication and by facilitating appropriate acceptance/rejection of novel concepts.

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Acknowledgements

The article is a spin-off of a discussion during the Foundations of biology 2016 meeting at IISER, Pune. I acknowledge all participants in the discussion. The survey used in the article was a group activity by undergraduate and graduation students in which Vishak Sagar, Shrinidhi Mahishi, Manawa Diwekar, Shubhankar Kulkarni and Pramod Patil contributed. I also thank Avantika Jakati for help in preparation of the manuscript.

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  1. Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Dr. Homi Bhabha Road, Pune, 411 008, India

    Milind Watve

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Correspondence to Milind Watve.

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Watve, M. Social behavioural epistemology and the scientific community. J Genet 96, 525–533 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12041-017-0790-y

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