Peer Review and Confirmation Bias

A few years ago one of my professors discussed the concept of Peer Review, Gatekeeping and the Ivory Tower. Her lecture discussed how the culture/environment of a department and/or field can affect literature produced by researchers. It is possible that if a body of researchers in a peer review have the same stance on certain issues a confirmation bias occurs where work which reflects their opinions goes on to pass the peer review process while work that is contrary to their convictions may get thrown out the door. This can transfer into thesis committees and journals thereby limiting the diversity of work accepted and thus acting as gatekeepers of what knowledge is deemed acceptable or not. This raises the question of how authentic certain research is and we arrive at the Ivory Tower analogy.

A somewhat similar process occurs in the publishing industry where agents and imprints only select works which they know will sell and can make a profit off of. In the publishing industry a number of alternatives have been used to circumvent this issue such as small presses and publications. I know in academia researchers can take their work to other journals or students can try and find other advisors for their work, but I wonder what the consequences of this are. I am very much open to using and legitimizing alternative sources of information and publishing, however, to what degree (if at all) do we need a framework to operate within?

Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow specifically discusses our own cognitive and personal biases that arise. One interesting example he gives is a test he did on himself to see if he was bias in grading his students papers. He was able to confirm that depending on how well the first few papers he graded faired, combined with is own energy levels, they affected the median grade of the course. Students marked towards the end depending on a variety of factors had less of a chance to do well. This makes me wonder about the peer review process and whether or not we should hold it as our gold standard.