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How to deal with researcher harassment in the social sciences

Nature Human Behaviour volume 5, pages 178–180 (2021)Cite this article

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The harassment of researchers working in the social sciences—not rarely an organized effort targeting members of marginalized groups—is most alarming. Its implications reach from severe personal consequences to the risk of scientific self-censorship. We invite readers to engage in a much-needed discourse about this worrisome phenomenon.

When engaging controversial research topics—such as racism, extremist movements, gender identity or other politically charged issues—social scientists may sometimes find themselves thrust into the very conflicts they were hoping to examine from a neutral perspective. Problems might start with verbal confrontations during a field study or outraged emails after an online survey, but this is not where the pushback necessarily ends. As our own experiences from the recent past illustrate, even innocuous, small-scale research projects may evoke coordinated efforts by opposing forces, resulting in the tainting of data as well as a lost sense of security among empirical investigators. We believe that the phenomenon of researcher harassment carries heavy implications for many disciplines, not least in psychology and related areas, and that an informed meta-discourse is needed to prevent an exclusionary, self-censoring approach to social science.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Psychology of Communication and New Media, University of Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany

    Jan-Philipp Stein & Markus Appel

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  1. Jan-Philipp Stein
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  2. Markus Appel
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Correspondence to Jan-Philipp Stein.

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Stein, JP., Appel, M. How to deal with researcher harassment in the social sciences. Nat Hum Behav 5, 178–180 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-020-01011-6

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