Where Can We Get More Cultural Variation in Science?

Different organizational cultures produce different science

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Different organizational cultures produce different science. Yes, science is all part of the same collective effort, but what a particular research institution works on and how it operates are choices which depend on the culture of the people making them. If we want more variation in the subjects and methods of science then we need more variation in the cultures of groups working on it.

So, where can we get more cultural variation in science?

One place is untapped geographic variation. Although individuals from most countries do migrate to the world’s scientific centers, that usually involves a great deal of assimilation and requires playing by the host institution’s rules. There are many countries that have yet to create their first world-class research institution and many more whose leading labs have yet to attract meaningful flows of scientific migrants. Meanwhile, global economic trends suggest that many countries will have the resources to build world-class research institutions in our lifetimes. How will science be done at Nigeria’s first global research campus? How will that evolve when people from all over the world begin moving there to work and study?

Another place to get cultural variation is from deliberately enabling different cultures. This can be as simple as trying (and funding) a wider range of organizational structures. It can also mean thinking deliberately about the culture of individual research groups within a larger institution. As much as we’re in favor of taking steps to raise the floor of PI management competence, we don’t want standardization that lowers the ceiling of individual groups or (a more subtle problem) removes variation between groups in a way that hurts the overall scientific effort.

Finally, we can get more cultural variation by accommodating more weirdness in individuals’ behavior, interactions, and ideas. Part of this is interpersonal tolerance, but more of it will come from building systems and organizations that make it pleasant to be weird and to be around weirdness. Is your colleague at the Institute for Advanced Study bothering you? You can lose them easily in the woods! The Institute’s two acres of grounds per scholar is a great example of what an affordance for being weird and dealing with weirdness looks like.

If we build on more cultural foundations and accommodate more individual differences, we expect to get different (and better!) science.