Because the machine can discriminate: How machine learning serves and transforms biological explanations of human difference

Abstract

Research on scientific/intellectual movements, and social movements generally, tends to focus on resources and conditions outside the substance of the movements, such as funding and publication opportunities or the prestige and networks of movement actors. Drawing on Pinch’s theory of technologies as institutions, I argue that research methods can also serve as resources for scientific movements by institutionalizing their ideas in research practice. I demonstrate the argument with the case of neuroscience, where the adoption of machine learning changed how scientists think about measurement and modeling of group difference. This provided an opportunity for members of the sex difference movement by offering a ‘truly categorical’ quantitative methodology that aligned more closely with their understanding of male and female brains and bodies as categorically distinct. The result was a flurry of publications and symbiotic relationships with other researchers that rescued a scientific movement which had been growing increasingly untenable under the prior methodological regime of univariate, frequentist analyses. I call for increased sociological attention to the inner workings of technologies that we typically black box in light of their potential consequences for the social world. I also suggest that machine learning in particular might have wide-reaching implications for how we conceive of human groups beyond sex, including race, sexuality, criminality, and political position, where scientists are just beginning to adopt its methods.