Subconscious value influences on science

Philosophical scholarship on science and values has gradually shifted away from asking whether values have any legitimate role to play in scientific judgment and decision-making and toward considering how to responsibly manage value influences to protect the integrity, rigor, reliability, and trustworthiness of science. This scholarship has focused primarily on helping individual scientists deal with cases in which they are aware of the values at stake and are able to make conscious choices about whether to incorporate them into their judgment and decision-making. This means that accounts of the relationship between science and values tend to focus on consciously perceived values and value influences and tend to overlook the effects of subconscious values on scientific judgment and decision-making. In this paper, we aim to show how greater attention to subconscious value influence on judgment and decision-making can deepen our understanding of the relationship between science and values and provide useful guidance for managing value influences. To achieve our goal, we first examine the literature on values, interests, and conflicts of interest (COI) to demonstrate the potential for values to be subconscious and/or to exert subconscious influences on scientific judgment and decision-making. Next, we discuss some of the specific ways those subconscious influences could affect scientific reasoning. Finally, we show that most contemporary proposals for managing values in science are not well-suited to handling subconscious values or value influences, and we briefly point to some management strategies that merit further development.