Fraught claims at the intersection of biology and sociality: Managing controversy in the neuroscience of poverty and adversity

Introduction

Research aimed at understanding the impact of adversity on brain development has expanded rapidly in the past fifteen years. Policymakers, health practitioners and other interested parties have been working to incorporate these findings into science-based interventions to improve both cognitive capacity and health outcomes for children over their lifetimes. In this article, I tell the story of how a specific subgroup of neuroscientists studying the role adverse experiences play in brain development became the center of controversy. The neuroscientists I studied are strongly committed to doing research that improves the lives of disadvantaged children, notably through social programs. Despite this enthusiasm about optimizing children’s brain development, these ideas have been and continue to be controversial, and the researchers find themselves the target of scrutiny. A number of critics have argued that this research ultimately harms marginalized groups, namely poor racial minorities. They suggest this linking of biology and sociality that locates adversity in the brain is racist and eugenicist, or at least has racist and eugenicist implications. I detail the strategies the researchers develop to try to manage this controversy. They counter criticism in a strikingly uniform way, using a common set of discourses in an attempt to close debate. But I also argue that controversy is this field is unmanageable and that scientific research on social issues such as these is essentially fraught.

For this article, I use interview data and field notes from a multi-sited, multi-year ethnographic project on knowledge production in developmental and cognitive neuroscience, including its translation into nascent policy (Tolwinski, 2017). The interviews here are a subset of the 60 interviews conducted for the larger study, interviews with neuroscientists and people making relevant science-based policy, including neuroscientists who are involved in both lab science and policymaking. My interviewees were not concerned with me using their names, but I choose to use pseudonyms to protect their privacy. The actors at the center of the controversy I describe are scientists working at the intersections of psychology and neuroscience, who study the role of trauma and socioeconomic status on brain development, especially in the late 1990s and early 2000s. This is a hybrid, interdisciplinary subfield that I have termed ‘social developmental neuroscience’ to suggest coherence around a set of research questions and social issues. Like any other ‘core-set’ (Collins, 1981) the field is composed of a relatively small group of people – a few labs, a handful of principle investigators, and a cadre of postdocs, graduate students, and other lab workers. In the early years when that small group of principle investigators took up these research questions, that work was very much marginal to the disciplines and subfields they were trained in. The numbers of scientists engaged in these research programs is expanding, and more recently, the research has garnered much interest from those interested in its policy implications.

Along with data from those directly targeted by critics, I also take data from other neuroscience and science-policy interviewees who are involved in the controversy because they work in the broader field of developmental neuroscience. They also felt the impact of the criticism, and often felt compelled to respond in order to ‘correct’ what they see as misapprehensions about neuroscience, and developmental neuroscience in particular. I asked all of my interviewees involved in research, either currently or in the past, about this controversy. Twenty-five had substantive and sustained responses to these lines of criticism. The remaining neuroscientist interviewees who did not have substantive responses to the issue dismissed the controversy as irrelevant, believing that the controversy erupted because of incomplete data; they appear to have a teleological view of scientific knowledge, in which controversy inevitably subsides as more data becomes available. Yet, criticism and controversy continue to resurface.

Ongoing controversy: Psychopaths and eugenicists?

In my first interviews with neuroscientists, I assumed that my potential interviewees would be relatively unaware of the kinds of criticism I was preparing to discuss with them. However, they were highly aware of and enthusiastic about discussing challenges. I found my interviewees eager to discuss the implications of the work, specifically the possibility that the research ends up labeling poor, racial-minority children as brain-damaged or defective. I eventually came to call this the ‘broken brains’ critique. This criticism is notable because it initially came from the scientific community itself. Researchers faced this criticism from the outset of their research programs. In the early 2000s, potential funders strongly rebuked one of my interviewees when she tried to obtain grant funding. A pioneering researcher in the field, who I will call Jill, recounted to me some of the first reactions to her proposed research program from other scientists:

I’ll tell you that the early, my early attempts to get funded to do this research were all rebuffed with really scathing reviews calling me-, basically name-calling, saying I was a reductionist, saying that I was pathologizing poor children, that I was suggesting that poverty is a brain disease. I mean, these are in quotes in reviews. (Interview, Jill)

A supportive colleague who had been witness to some of this criticism told Jill exactly how contentious the ideas were, and the word eugenics was invoked.

He said there was a riot, people said you’re bringing back the eugenicists, and he said, look, I can do a lot in terms of, you know, using my judgment to decide who to fund and not, but when the reviewers are like, over our dead bodies, I can’t, I can’t fund you. So in the end, he got us one year of funding, and that got us started, but yeah, that’s really the way it was at first. (Interview, Jill)

A developmental psychologist and neuroscientist working on the effects of trauma on brain development and behavior reports that his research, too, was met with suspicion and derision. As a PhD student in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Sean studied childhood maltreatment. He was dealing with extreme abuse, of children ‘having experiences not typical for our species’, like burning, choking, punching, physical abuse that is ‘likely to be permanently disfiguring’, and leaving children unattended in dangerous situations (Interview, Sean). Those reviewing his grant application thought there was something wrong with not only his research, but also his character.

They felt that, wait a minute, you’re taking traumatized children, and you’re going to put electrodes and wires on their heads? They thought that this was barking up the wrong tree. … One of the members of that review panel called my graduate advisor and said, I just read this grant application that [Sean] did, and said, what kind of person is this, is he a psychopath? Like what kind of person would take these young children having these kinds of problems and want to focus on the brain? (Interview, Sean)

The way one of my interviewees explains it, the scientific community was concerned with biological research that touched on sensitive social issues. One of Jill’s graduate students at the time, Nicole, suggests that neuroscientists were worried about politics, seeing in the work glimmers of the controversial and racist pseudoscience linking race and IQ, specifically The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (Herrnstein and Murray, 1994). It is reasonable to assume that researchers doing biological research in the late 1990s and early 2000s, as many of my interviewees and their critics were, wanted to be especially cautious, and they were unwilling to support a project that they thought could be problematic and controversial. The specter of The Bell Curve continues to haunt the genetic research community; this is especially true for the behavior genetics community (Nelson, 2018; Panofsky, 2014).

As unpleasant as these early experiences were for my neuroscientist interviewees, they argue that the scientific community eventually understood their work to be legitimate and valuable. It may be true that many of their previous critics in the neuroscience community now support this work, however, this is also a rhetorical move that helps the researchers forestall criticism and demarcate legitimate (scientific) concerns from illegitimate (non-scientific) ones. This is significant because criticism has not subsided and is now voiced by other actors. Social scientists and journalists have raised similar concerns about the eugenic and racist implications of the research. While criticism from social scientists, journalists and lay publics might not have the same weight as that of their peers, research that has imminent policy implications must inevitably engage with critics in the world at large, so my interviewees found themselves on the defense again, a decade or more later.

Accounting for misunderstandings in neuroscience

The first way that neuroscientists argue that criticism of their work is unfounded is by claiming that their detractors fundamentally misapprehend the work. Jill exhibited care when introducing her findings to me, and wanted to ensure that I knew what the claims meant: ‘I know that this really does sound like [pause] I mean, it’s really hard to talk about these things and not be misunderstood as saying pretty hateful things like, well, they have inferior brains, so of course they’re poor’ (Interview, Jill). A postdoc in another lab echoed that sentiment and was particularly concerned with how lay publics interpret the work. Speaking of evidence from fMRI that shows differences in brain structure across socioeconomic status, he said

it still needs to be informed, in my opinion, that the environment likely created a lot of what you are seeing in the scan, and of course that the environment can change that. I sometimes worry that laymen read certain neuroscience research and think, ‘Oh they scanned poor people’s brains and they look different than ours. They’re just different.’ … It gets dangerous, especially when there are certain races that end up making the poorer populations. (Interview, Miles)

While the neuroscientists report feeling vindicated, they do recognize that their findings are ripe for misinterpretation. Their ideas were, after all, unorthodox, and any kind of boundary testing research is likely to face challenges. However, the troubled history of eugenics lingers around the margins of these debates. While my interviewees do not necessarily articulate this point in these terms, they were keenly aware of how the ideas might sound to an outside observer. They wanted to assure me, a potential critic, no doubt, that they did not hold dangerous or hateful ideas. They also wanted to ensure that I understood exactly what they believe their research does and does not argue. The eugenicist and racist idea that poverty can be explained and justified by biological difference is one that these scientists find abhorrent and scientifically untenable. They maintain that this is a fundamental misinterpretation of the work. Problems emerge, as they see it, only when those with insufficient expertise misunderstand science. That they make these caveats shows their anxiety about the topic, regardless of how ignorant they believe the criticism ultimately is. Kerr et al. (1998) argue that geneticists working in the mid- to late-1990s had to contend with comparisons to eugenics in their research, so it appears that scientists working in genetics and gene-environment interaction, particularly around that time, had to distance themselves from this history. It should not be surprising that these questions reemerge for those researching the interconnectedness of biology and sociality, particularly when links are made between racialized bodies and environments of poverty and adversity.

Though I suggest that this research has been controversial because studying the relationship between social life and biology inevitably harkens back to the troubled history of eugenic programs, my interlocutors have other ways of explaining why other scientists were reticent to fund their research. Both Jill and Sean believe that the composition and expertise of their audiences was to blame. As we see from the quote below, Sean believes that his work was misinterpreted because none of his audience had any training in biology.

One [problem] was that the panel that was comprised of the leading scientists studying child development and child welfare and behavioral problems. This panel of thirty had not one person who knew human biology. … So they didn’t think they could evaluate the methods I was using, and they were also very negative about it. (Interview, Sean)

Sean argues that biologists would have known that he was not barking up the wrong tree, as biology, and specifically that of the brain, links social experience and behavior. He was theorizing links between sociality and biology in ways that he felt had yet to be understood in psychology and neuroscience.

Jill offers precisely the opposite explanation. Rather than resulting from a lack of scientific understanding, Jill explains that critics’ ignorance of the sociological literature on race/ethnicity and poverty actually led to this misinterpretation.

Well, yeah, it’s so interesting. In fact really, I think the people who work on child poverty, the sociologists, … some of them don’t have any problem at all saying, yeah, look, their brains are affected by growing up like this. Whereas cognitive neuroscientists, they were so unfamiliar with discussions of these kind of issues. They were just really uptight and sort of puritanical about it, and we can’t talk about this. One review I got said it was irresponsible of me to do research on this topic. Just crazy, right? (Interview, Jill)

Jill’s postdoc Nicole, as I note above, does believe that politics made an impact on funders’ willingness to back the project. While Jill believes that cognitive neuroscientists were being ‘puritanical’ because of their lack of sociological knowledge, Nicole understands them as being puritanical for another reason, namely their desire to keep their science ‘clean’ and free from the controversy and political discussions.

[Sociologists] in the teacher’s college were thrilled because they had been talking about this – socioeconomic disparities in child development – for decades and we were going to sort of bring from their perspective quote un-quote ‘hard science’ this was perfect, this was legitimizing, this was wonderful. The cognitive neuroscientists, on the other hand, had a very different initial reaction where they were essentially saying why would you bring this complicated messy politicized topic into our clean world of brain science, you know, going to be viewed as the next Bell Curve …. (Interview Nicole)

While Sean, Jill and Nicole have different accounts of misunderstanding, they operate through what Gilbert and Mulkay (1984) call empiricist and contingent repertoires. In their analysis of scientists’ discourse, particularly how they account for error, Gilbert and Mulkay document how scientists hold that their own views are the result of unproblematic and unhindered lenses onto the world, while those who oppose them do so because extra-scientific factors occlude their observation of the facts, an empiricist and contingent repertoire, respectively. My interviewees above suggest that their critics were unable to see the phenomenon for what it truly was because some social factor, the wrong education or a fear of politics, interfered with their objective view of the world. Their detractors just could not understand the constitutive role social life played in brain development; my informants implied that those critics were stuck in old paradigms that did not allow them to see through perspectives of nature and nurture or nurture affects nature.

Additionally, neuroscientists in this subfield believe that by working outside the confines of a traditional controlled and reductionist perspective, engaging in complex questions that simultaneously attend to and intervene on both social and biological life, they are seeing the world as it truly is. While their critics in the scientific community may balk at how they move beyond controlled, reductionist approaches, and into inherently more complex and uncertain work, my interviewees seemed to revel in this fact. First, they like these difficult causal puzzles, and this is one of the reasons that postdoc Steve, for instance, finds the field ‘exciting’. But more importantly, they believe themselves to be studying the world as it is meant to be studied. While controlling independent variables may be ideal for scientists working in the lab, my interviewees tend to understand themselves as doing the difficult, but ultimately more accurate, work of understanding a complex assemblage of biological and social parts that exist in the ‘real world’. For them, this provides a true, albeit complex, view onto nature. I asked Jill about her study design, which seemed quite complicated. She told me that, while challenging, she believed she was bringing together sociology and biology, and that this was not only satisfying, but ultimately the correct way of understanding these phenomena.

It is worth noting, however, that though they argue that they move beyond a standard reductionist model of scientific inquiry, my interviewees operate through reductionist and determinist logics. They are ultimately searching for molecular mechanisms that underlie the phenomena they study. They may see their approach as distinct, but they agree that reductionism is a necessarily part of scientific inquiry on the whole. These researchers simultaneously use discourses of reductionism and complexity when describing their research programs. Of course, invoking both reductionism and complexity does discursive work. Using reductionist methods fits squarely with their scientific training and grants them credibility. Complexity discourse offers another form of legitimacy. Arribas-Ayllon et al. (2010: 500) argue that psychiatric geneticists use complexity to put forth their ‘research as cautious, flexible, and responsible science’ and to ‘provide theoretical coherence and respectability to an otherwise ambivalent relationship between genetic and non-genetic factors’. When my interviewees defend their research as a necessarily complex understanding of the world, it does a great deal of work for their scientific credibility. They promote themselves as seeing the phenomena in an unmediated and therefore objective way that has theoretical legitimacy. And, simultaneously, invoking discourses of complexity allows them to present their work as careful and intellectually curious.

Plasticity talk: Anti-determinism and a reason for hope

My interviewees told me that one of the foremost flaws in their detractors’ criticism of their work was their ignorance of scientific knowledge of plasticity. They argue that this fundamental misapprehension results in unfounded conclusions that the work is eugenicist in nature. Discourses of plasticity were exceedingly common in my interview transcripts. What I will term ‘plasticity talk’ is an essential part of my interviewees’ arsenal in countering criticism. Plasticity talk adds specificity to the arguments about misunderstanding and also allows my interviewees to give their work a moral valence. In a classic text on the potential implications of genetics, Kitcher (1996) introduces the term ‘genetalk’ to speak of trends of genetic determinism in science and popular culture. Though plasticity talk does not rise to the prominence of genetalk, I suggest that some parallels exist where plasticity becomes a catchall term to explain why it is that we are who we are. And while genetalk is suggestive of genetic determinism, plasticity talk defines an anti-determinist discourse that fits nicely with the theoretical and social justice commitments of those doing work on gene-environment interaction. It can do a lot of heavy lifting for scientists wanting to emphasize the ambiguity and complexity of their findings. I argue that plasticity talk is the foremost tool that these neuroscientists use to deflect comparisons to eugenics. In the majority of my interview discussions about the ‘broken brains’ problem, they would inevitably turn to plasticity to defend their position. One scientist gave a pithy response to my question about eugenics critique: ‘It’s because the public doesn’t understand left-brain plasticity’ (Interview, Wanda). Others share this view, but explain it more thoroughly, as Nicole does in her response to the criticism: ‘[W]e very much know that there’s early plasticity based on the environment. So in no way does an association between environmental and brain outcomes imply some kind of immutability or even genetic basis.’ The issue, as they see it, is that their audiences do not understand the science of plasticity and developmental time, and by extension, the complex interweaving of experience and the body, environment and genes, society and biology. That is, the audience is fundamentally wrong to believe that biology is innate and unchanging or that any experience causes permanent damage. They believe that understanding plasticity will help scientist and non-scientist audiences understand how biology can change over time and how theirs is a hopeful project.

Before delving into the details of plasticity talk, however, it is worth discussing why these audiences are ‘misinformed’ about developmental plasticity. Early attempts to emphasize early experience led to confusion. My interviewees hinted towards this issue, and it has been discussed in detail by Bruer (1999). When discussing this issues, scientists maintain that publics, politicians, and the media are often to blame for misunderstanding and controversy in science. In the 1990s, President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Clinton – in particular Hillary Clinton, who had spent a year at the Yale Child Study Center – emphasized early experience as a foundation for healthy functioning. In the White House, she organized a conference, Early Childhood Development, which was fundamental in putting early experience in the spotlight. For one of my interviewees, this powerful policy move may have created trouble for scientists working on brain development. My interviewee Sando, echoing Bruer’s (1999) account, puts the blame on non-scientists, especially Hollywood director Rob Reiner, for speech he made at the White House conference:

Back in the Clinton years they had a White House conference on Early Child Development, and the scientists were careful in pointing out what was possible. There wasn’t as much information about plasticity, but then entertainers like Rob Reiner and so on came in, in a very heavy-handed way, and said if we don’t do anything before age two it’s all over, so essentially, it’s back to back to biology is destiny. (Interview, Sando)

Another one of my interviewees recounted a similar story and suggests that such misinterpretations of science have policy effects, often for years to come.

Hillary Clinton organized a White House conference on early childhood and at that meeting there were some psychologists, educators and neuroscientists, but the translation, … of the message from that meeting was about the importance of the first years of life for brain development and obviously for adaptive behavioral development. And in fact there was a cover of Newsweek that had a baby sitting there and it said basically that everything that you did in those first months and year of life was critical in terms of brain organization and wiring and the other part of that message was if it didn’t occur in those early years of life then you were finished because there was this sort of sensitive period during which it all had to occur, and if it didn’t occur tough luck to you. And there were interesting spillovers to that. So the Governor of Georgia sent home [Mozart] audio cassettes. ¹ (Interview, Bogdan)

Ironically enough, it appears that an emphasis on early experience led to a deterministic understanding of development; this perspective became dominant at the expense of theories of developmental plasticity. Determinism stuck. Clinton had wanted to tilt the discourse away from genetic and biological determinism and towards the suggestion that experience matters. However, efforts to publicly push the nature versus nurture argument a little towards the nurture side (and also towards contingency over innateness) reified a biologically determinist argument: ‘biology is destiny’ and ‘tough luck’. Instead of integrating nurture more thoroughly into the developmental model, this policy work unexpectedly led to the idea that experience matters for two years in which it has a deterministic, certain and enduring relationship with future health and wellness. What my interviewees want to warn against are deterministic arguments of any kind. Researchers in a number of subfields of biology are, in fact, eschewing nature versus nurture arguments in favor of ones that theorize nature and nurture as always already intertwined and mutually constitutive. Policy and communication efforts in the 1990s did indeed lead to the insight that children are not ‘born this way’, but my participants say they must now put a great deal of effort into explaining that these experiences do not produce permanent biological changes. Perhaps it is not so surprising that audiences have been confused about permanence and plasticity. As my interviewees tell it, this ‘ruckus’ was the impetus for doing more research on brain development and neural plasticity. Notes Bogdan:

[We didn’t] have any evidence that, there [was] no hard empirical evidence that the first years of life are critical for brain wiring, for organization, for later cognitive and social behavior. So that caused something of a ruckus and the McArthur Foundation … put out a call for the organization of a research network that would bring together developmental psychologists and neuroscientists to basically discuss and think about these particular issues and particularly the issue of sensitive periods of early experience and what we know about it with regard to brain development. (Interview, Bogdan)

The MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Early Experience & Brain Development was funded from 1997 to 2009, and produced a wealth of knowledge about brain development, including key insights about developmental time and neural plasticity. When interviewees like Sean and Jill faced criticism, especially of the broken brains variety, part of the difficulty was that many of the more definitive studies of brain development had not taken place or were in progress. One interviewee told me that Jill’s findings were central in clarifying some of the key claims about plasticity (Interview, Krystin). While Jill’s student Nicole may think that plasticity is obvious and fundamental to neuroscience, it was not until they published their work that they had good evidence to support plasticity claims. As early contributors to this area of study, however, Jill and Nicole had few, if any, studies that could help them defend their position. Today, scientists faced with criticism have these findings in their repertoire and can deploy them to defend their concepts and claims. Considering this history, my interviewees were keen to clarify these ideas. ²

It was clear that my interviewees were excited to get to discussions of plasticity. When it came to responding to the broken brains criticism, plasticity was their trump card. Like good students eager to answer an exam question for which they had studied, my interviewees seemed to automatically launch into plasticity talk when faced with the vexing problem of audience misinterpretation. I moved into the topic with a prompt such as: ‘what do you think of this criticism of the work, that it suggests that poor children are brain damaged?’ The overwhelming response was that it was a shame that good science had been misinterpreted and maligned in such a way, but that that was to be expected, considering critics’ lack of knowledge of neuroscience, especially plasticity and the nature of the brain.

Plasticity talk often begins with my interviewees telling me how biology and behavior work:

[I]t was the advent [of plasticity], I mean people were beginning to do some of it in humans. Many of the people were doing it at that time were interested in temperament so they wanted this biological level more as a fixed, an immutable index of what biology gave you and then experience would give you something else. But true biology doesn’t think that way. It has never thought that way. … So human behavior is part of the adaptive program. It is biological and biological systems are adaptable and changeable, and nature is all about trying to survive and continue to function. (Interview, Wanda)

From my interviewees’ standpoint, these ideas are basic, but also revolutionary in the context of common and even expert understandings about both the body and brain’s mutability. Communicating these more complicated truths about biology proves challenging.

It’s not black and white. So I think it’s difficult when you talk to the public. People, everybody, we like having black and white messages, categorizing things x, y and z, but that’s not how biology occurs. It’s extraordinarily complicated. (Interview, Grace)

Below, another scientist talks plasticity, and also details some of its social and evolutionary advantages.

And one of the big challenges is if the brain is shaped in one direction and the person is transplanted into a different culture, what are the capacities for change, for plasticity? We used to think that is was negligible because the brain was fixed, but with all this knowledge of plasticity, neurogenesis, the re-organization of dendrites, the continual turnover of at least a sub-set of synaptic directions – all of this means that there is some potential for [change]. (Interview, Sando)

My interviewees also made clear to me that plasticity is ongoing:

Brain plasticity is huge in the first three years, [but] I think sometimes people … think by age four, forget it, you’re done. It’s certainly not like that. (Interview, Nicole)

Our brains are plastic now!’ (Interview, Jack)

We focus on the early years [but] there’s brain plasticity in adulthood.’ (Interview, Grace)

If you take somebody in their sixties and seventies who is a couch potato [and] you get them off their duff and they walk an hour a day … it enlarges their hippocampus, improves their executive function … you’re never too old to benefit. (Interview, Sando)

These discussions of plasticity illustrate the emergence of a new, hopeful view of the brain as a highly adaptive mediator between culture and biology, genes and environment. While there is less agreement on how long these periods of plasticity last, some champion the idea that even the 80-year-old brain has the capacity for development, and therefore, can experience cognitive change in a positive direction. Bogdan suggests that there’s no sensitive period for cognitive development.

[I]n terms of more complex cognitive functions, it doesn’t seem like there’s a sensitive period. What we do know is that brain development occurs in a fashion such that circuits are laid one upon the other and it becomes harder with development to learn certain complex things than it is when you are younger. It is easier when you are younger to learn, but it’s not impossible to learn. … And that’s the important message there. (Interview, Bogdan)

My interviews frequently used the example of language acquisition to tell me, their non-specialist audience, how plasticity and critical periods in brain development work. Learning a language is easier at a young age, but this does not mean that language acquisition is impossible for adults; it simply takes more effort. The brain can be ‘rewired’ over the life course. Under this logic, we can see how neuroscientists take a hopeful view of their research. As one interviewee notes, ‘that’s what giving us hope that we should not give up’ (Interview, Sando). At no point is the brain finished developing, and any ‘wiring’ can be adjusted. When I asked PhD student Ginger what she wanted the public to know about socioeconomic status and brain development, she highlighted hope while also maintaining the importance (and potentially enduring effect) of early experience:

I would want them to know that socioeconomic status can have really drastic effects on children’s development for a variety of reasons. The stress that’s involved with low socioeconomic status, resources that a family has access to, can really determine their developmental trajectory. So that’s one thing that’s important. … But, on the other hand, another important thing to remember is that those effects are not intractable. … Kids are also extremely resilient, and they can be very receptive to positive influences in the environment, speaking toward the importance of intervention and early intervention. So it’s going to be mindful of the problems that individuals face as a result of socioeconomic status, be mindful of the potential of positive change that can come about. (Interview, Ginger)

While the details vary from scientist to scientist, most have well-rehearsed repertoires of plasticity talk. Deploying it when necessary, they deflect criticism that their work describes immutable brain changes. Always underlying this discourse is a hopeful premise – an anti-determinist message that highlights the possibility of positive change. Children are not cognitively hardwired by age three, adolescents and adults can do much to improve themselves, couch potatoes can become healthy, and 80-year-olds can still learn new things. My neuroscientist interviewees thus argue that theirs is a hopeful project wherein the brain can be altered, and new prevention and intervention strategies can ensure that any child’s life course can be rerouted and optimized. Concepts of hope and change are quite the opposite of eugenic discourses of innate and immutable ability based on genetic makeup, so plasticity talk appears to my interviewees an effective method with which to refute criticism that they are racists and eugenicists. In other moments, my interviewees did imply that there were limits of plasticity. Their arguments for early intervention are predicated on the notion that the capacity to shape brain development is limited. This discourse allows for change and hope, but not in infinite amounts. And for the purposes of advocating for optimal childhood development, their rhetorical strategy cannot suggest that the brain is so plastic that interventions in early childhood are meaningless. They must navigate competing discourses of plasticity and permanence as they respond to controversy and advocate for children.

Scientists for social justice: Balancing politics and objectivity

When faced with criticism, several of my interviewees deploy another kind of response, highlighting their knowledge of, and commitment to, social and political causes. Scientists feel compelled to respond to the criticism because they believe their status as good, ethical scientists and decent human beings is being challenged, or at a minimum, they recognize how damaging it is to be seen as bad actors doing unethical research. The fraught context places strong rhetorical pressure on researchers to assert their orientation to social justice. The majority of the people I interviewed, regardless of age and experience, came into this research with at least some social and political motivations informing their scientific interests. For most, these political orientations were foundational for their interest in the work. ³ As they present themselves, criticism that suggests they are racist, eugenicist, or insensitive feels absurd, even laughable, to them. ⁴ Some take it in stride, while others are angry and horrified. These are individuals who have been involved in anti-racist and anti-poverty work for a long time. Given the seriousness of the criticism, they feel obligated to respond, and in doing so, they reveal their political and social motivations.

One can see explicit repudiation of the criticism in some of the quotes I have already presented from Sean and Jill. When called a psychopath, Sean recounts that his supervisor defended him: ‘He’s a very nice person who cares about children’ (Interview, Sean). He seeks to have a policy impact in his current work, and has solicited collaborations with economists to make arguments about the cost-effectiveness of social programs. He and I spoke easily about our progressive political views. The criticism is especially ironic for researchers like Sean, considering his difficulty on the job market, where the research was considered ‘social work’. Far from being insensitive to the issues, Sean was seen as caring too much.

When I went on the job market, I was talking about my work on brain function in abused children. I literally had the professors in the clinical psychology program at one university, they sat there like this [with their arms crossed]. I went into one person’s office, and she said, I don’t understand why what you’re doing that would contribute to a clinical psychology program, I don’t understand why you’re here. Why did you apply for this job? [They] thought this was a social work-, you know, abused children seemed like a social work problem. (Interview, Sean)

When Jill and I discussed the issue that the work might pathologize poor children, she spent a great deal of time explaining to me how she wound up doing this work, and that it was informed by an interest in ameliorating poverty and inequality. She did not jump into the research naïvely; she educated herself on the social science literature on class, race and inequality. On the recommendation of a friend, she read Oscar Lewis’s classic on urban poverty and race, La Vida (Lewis, 1966). Further, she has made efforts to study the effects of socioeconomic status (SES) when most studies in neuroscience ignore this variable altogether. Most fMRI studies use middle class participants. Jill believes that attending to SES makes her one of the few neuroscientists who understands how significant SES and race are in America.

These kinds of personal recollections were common in the interview setting. In response to criticism, interviewees share with me their own ‘developmental origins’ in the field, and many, if not most, report that their scientific work is intimately linked to issues of equality and social justice. Nicole, for instance, volunteered in children’s theater as an undergraduate student, working extensively with poor, minority children. A graduate student I interviewed, Krystin, reported social justice as a major rationale for doing a PhD in this area. She considers herself active in the social justice arena, and worked for Teach for America after college. Postdoc Miles was unsatisfied with his undergraduate education in neuroscience because it did not delve into the social causes of health disparity. He sought out a PhD program that would allow him to tackle these complex questions and to think about how neuroscience applied to the so-called ‘real world’. Donna, a self-described ‘hardcore’ neuroscientist, is primarily concerned with improving children’s experience in school, advocating an approach that balances the academic and emotional needs of children. I also spoke with a number of pediatricians and MD/PhDs whose main motivation for doing what they do is helping disadvantaged children; many report working in clinics that serve marginalized populations or Medicaid recipients. These are only a few histories, and there are more. Those I interviewed hope that the claims they make through neuroscience can be used (carefully) to inform new social interventions that improve children’s life and ultimately foster greater equality.

Many of my interviewees have explicit plans to use the science instrumentally to make an impact on discussions of poverty and adversity. Researchers use neuroscience to support findings that they know to be true from decades of literature in the social sciences. In doing so, however, they must manage competing desires to do both ‘social work’ and objective scientific analysis. Krystin reflects upon this issue. She recognizes the importance of using science strategically yet finds herself in a quandary.

I mean I think that’s actually a thing I’ve really struggled with, what I see my role as because I know poverty is bad. … And I think that was part of my motivation. My motivation was partly wanting to use the science to strengthen the case that we need to do more about poverty, and I think that is a little bit of a questionable thing when we think about what science is supposed to be. … It’s really at the point where [this research] can be marketed to say look poverty is changing brain. Now do we believe that it’s bad? (Interview, Krystin)

Krystin gets at a number of significant issues here. First, she recognizes the power of scientific evidence to highlight which social issues are legitimate. People and organizations have a finite capacity to deal with social problems, so those social problems must compete for scarce attention (Hilgartner and Bosk, 1988), and as Krystin so astutely recognizes, poverty must be ‘marketed’ in a particular way. Many of my interviewees understand the power of scientific discourse and wish to use a ‘hot’ field to help mitigate racial and economic inequality; they are doing what Shostak (2013) terms ‘political science’. Second, Krystin recognizes that there is tension between an idealized vision of a scientist and the real role a scientist occupies in a society that needs research to help it best address social problems. She must manage the tension between being informed by strong social and political beliefs and believing in an apolitical and objective scientific ideal. While she knows that she does careful scientific work, she is mindful of the intrusion, or at least the appearance of intrusion, of politics into scientific work. The study of poverty may always look political to outside observers, and my interviewees understand that. They sometimes worry about studying poverty and inequality, even though they have read plenty of quantitative and qualitative research that supports the claims they make about the negative impact of poverty. Regardless of these concerns, Krystin believes that the research is solid enough that it can now be used to make changes at the social level, and what is more, she recognizes its unique capacity to influence public opinion and policy. In the larger project, I report on another set of critics who suggest these scientists are hijacking objective scientific inquiry with liberal preoccupations with social justice. This is particularly ironic for my participants who on the one hand, hear from more progressive critics that they are eugenicists and racists, and on the other, are told that they are bleeding-heart liberals whose desires for social justice destroys their scientific objectivity. While they feel they cannot win, they are also certain that the controversy will die down, as the public will eventually come to better understand the scientific and social underpinnings of their research programs, and ultimately support their projects.

One finding that may be surprising to those engaged in discussions of biomedicalization (Clarke et al., 2010) and again points to the seemingly contrary elements of these discourses is that while these neuroscientists study the molecular mechanisms pulling together biology and sociality in the individual, they ultimately advocate for social interventions. They suggest that problems located in individual brains must be addressed by targeting the collective. So while my interlocutors tend to frame social problems in biomedical terms – they argue that experience writes itself into the physical, molecular stuff of the brain and body – they advocate for increased funding for social programs, rather than biological interventions for individual children. In fact, none of them advocated for individual interventions, and especially not of a biomedical sort. The interventions they mentioned to me most often were increasing the minimum wage or implementing universal pre-K programs. This tendency to study the individual at the molecular level, yet also maintain that problems affecting the brain must be resolved through changes at the collective level leads me to suggest that that they operate with a version of Mills’s (1959) sociological imagination, where individual (biological) problems can only be understood within the context of greater societal structures. I discuss this ‘scientific sociological imagination’ elsewhere (Tolwinski, 2017).

Controversy management at the nexus of science and society

In this article, I have discussed the controversy management techniques of a set of well-intentioned neuroscientists facing criticism. While studying the social shaping of the brain they have been accused of doing harm to the very population that they intend to help. In response to criticism that they turn poverty into a biological problem with racist and eugenicist implications, they argue that: the work is misunderstood, critics do not understand that developmental plasticity makes the criticisms moot, and they are from the very outset of their research programs fighting for income and racial equality. I have suggested that my interviewees promote a kind of sociological imagination wherein society is essential to understanding how individual bodies – and by extension, individual problems – develop.

Just as my neuroscientist interviewees insist that development does not follow a strict nature versus nurture model, so too do their responses to controversy defy binary categorization. They believe that these findings are liberating, yet they also express concern that their work may be interpreted to mean that poor, racial minorities are biologically inferior. They prize reductionist techniques but approach nature as a complex entity that they must address in a holistic manner. My interviewees argue that changes in negative experiences in childhood are so damaging that we must take action, but also pull back and emphasize plasticity just enough to retain hope that these children’s brains can recover. They claim to be both social justice advocates working to mitigate inequality, and objective, unbiased observers of the natural world whose data will have the last word. Their scientific findings and their perspectives on their work are complex and seemingly contradictory. This makes controversy management a challenge. In their attempts to manage particular aspects of this recalcitrant controversy, they deploy discourses that reflect competing ideas. This often results in new criticism from different audiences about other aspects of their research practices and ideas. Controversy management in this field is like a game of whack-a-mole – just as critique is dealt with, another pops up beside it. In research that couples sociality and biology so closely, we can and should expect that claims-making is inevitably fraught and that controversy management is challenging and perhaps relentless. The dual nature of the research helps explain why scientists with good intentions unexpectedly find themselves the center of vigorous debate. Just as the scientists at the center of Reardon’s (2005) and Epstein’s (2007) studies were accused of hurting precisely the groups they hoped to help, my interviewees find themselves implicated in debates they did not anticipate. Good intentions are not enough, and they cannot and should not be the basis for building ethical and rigorous research programs. It may be unreasonable to expect scientists to have a sophisticated understanding of all of the social and ethical issues that arise from their research, but these controversies reveal the importance of engaging with social scientists and publics at different stages in the research and translation process. Perhaps this would change the nature of the research and lead to fewer instances of needing to do controversy management in the first place.

My interviewees are embroiled in discussions about political and social life by virtue of pursuing the research questions they do; they are questions about not only biology, but also poverty and justice. This is consistent with Panofsky’s (2014) observation that controversy is more prevalent in studies where the social and the scientific cannot be easily disentangled. This helps explain why criticism resurfaces, regardless of the source and despite the fact that the science is ‘settled’, unlike Panofsky’s cases of ‘misbehaving science’: ‘Misbehaving science … is about the ambiguity of rules, the collective lack of appropriate rules, or a shortfall in their assertion or policing’ (p. 8). This is not true of this subfield of researchers, who report a strong adherence to both scientific norms and their own beliefs about social justice. If these researchers continue to dismiss critics of their work as merely ill-informed, they may do so to the detriment of their own interests in furthering social justice. Without attending to the contentious sokcial issues that their research raises, they are unlikely to make inroads into exactly those social problems they hope to address.

Scientists are often just as aware of, and concerned with, the social and ethical implications of scientific findings as their critics are. The neuroscientists I studied often report feeling that criticism is unfair and that their work is essential to breaking the cycles of inequality that find their ways into our bodies. However, the path that these findings will take and the subjectivities they will shape are not inevitable. Critical, sociological and anthropological inquiry into the potential impact of scientific findings can direct the path these kinds of necessarily fraught lines of research will ultimately take. What is less clear is whether neuroscience should be used to answer pressing questions about social problems. What kinds of discourses does neuroscience make possible, and which does it elide? Regardless, my interviewees recognize the rhetorical power of neuroscience and believe that is is the best tool they have at their disposal to speak truth to power.