Brian Martin

• PhD
• Professor Emeritus at University of Wollongong

During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, most health authorities, governments, and mass media organizations presented a single official view concerning lockdowns, masking, distancing, and vaccines. The methods used against contrary views can be classified into four types: flooding, ignoring, censoring, and attacking. The method of information fl...

Caroline Hunt-Matthes worked for the UN, became a whistleblower and made contact with other UN whistleblowers. Later, she edited the book We the People: the UN Whistleblowers. This is the introduction to the book, covering several perspectives for understanding whistleblowing.

Francine is a nurse, but her passion is helping activists be more effective. She decides to find out what activists can learn from academic work - maybe nothing! How better to do this than by recruiting some of her activist friends to join the project? Francine and her co-investigators explore how to obtain and understand scholarly articles and wha...

Strangely, few recent studies of misinformation have given attention to the concept of misinformation itself. An examination of several studies of Covid misinformation shows them to be implicitly based on having unquestioned possession of the truth, so there is no attention to struggles over who decides what counts as misinformation and no mention...

Hamas’ 7 October 2023 attack on Israel and the subsequent Israeli military attack on Gaza have generated enormous reactions of rage and despair throughout much of the world. To understand these reactions, it is helpful to consider the tactics commonly used by powerful perpetrators of actions that audiences perceive as unjust. Outrage-management tac...

Annie Jacobsen's book Nuclear War: A Scenario is highly realistic in its technical and human details, but has some shortcomings, especially in portraying global nuclear war as the end of civilisation.

Some censorship in science is driven by race and gender orthodoxies, but there are deeper processes shaping scientific agendas: paradigms, suppression of dissent, undone science, and incorporated science.

In genocides, perpetrators use a variety of techniques to reduce public outrage. The genocides in Rwanda and Bangladesh offer insights for understanding the Israeli assault on Gaza.

In recent years, a major focus of research and campaigning on strategic nonviolent action has been on movements to oust authoritarian rulers. However, these “nonviolent revolutions” usually do not transform systems of economic and social domination. To motivate appreciation of what might be involved in a more far-reaching social transformation, sel...

Applying the label "misinformation" is assumed to justify censorship. A statement from YouTube illustrates the assumptions associated with the concern about alleged vaccine misinformation.

Over the past fifty years, have things been getting better or worse? Brian Martin sets out to address this big question by looking at a range of topics, from climate to feminism, from happiness to war, from deschooling to death. Along the way, he offers personal stories and assessments of key studies. This is an invitation to avoid excessive gloom...

Resistance studies can benefit by applying ideas from one domain to another. An important question is, who benefits from work in resistance studies? Academic politics is a largely untapped area for investigation.

Scholarly abuse takes many forms, including fraud, plagiarism, exploitation, exaggeration of credentials, and blocking others’ submissions and appointments. To better understand how such abuses continue, it is useful to look at tactics used by perpetrators to hide or legitimise their behaviours. For actions that are widely stigmatised, such as plag...

Australian governments have long been obsessed with keeping secrets. That includes silencing whistleblowers and journalists.

Conventional scientific theories can’t explain telepathy and precognition. Nor can they provide a convincing explanation for consciousness. The usual scientific assumption is that the material world is all there is. To explain anomalous evidence, should this assumption be superseded by a model in which consciousness is independent of matter?

The emergence of COVID-19 has led to numerous controversies over COVID-related knowledge and policy. To counter the perceived threat from doctors and scientists who challenge the official position of governmental and intergovernmental health authorities, some supporters of this orthodoxy have moved to censor those who promote dissenting views. The...

A new book offers the best available critique of vaccination orthodoxy.

Activists, to increase their impact and effectiveness, need to be as persuasive as possible. To illustrate how activists can learn from persuasion research, evidence and insights from the book Pre-suasion by Robert Cialdini are introduced and applied. Cialdini's core argument is that communicators, through certain techniques, can position their aud...

Essay review of Robert F Kennedy Jr's book The Real Anthony Fauci, comparing its claims with academic critiques of biomedine.

Benjamin Case (2021) argues that the framework of strategic nonviolence is limited by its assumption that violent protest necessarily demobilises movements, and that rioting can be empowering for participants. However, Case’s statistical analysis of US riots and peaceful demonstrations may not be a comparison of rioting and nonviolent action becaus...

Some threats to the social order, such as crime, drugs and terrorism, give rise to ongoing alarms. To understand both the alarms and their persistence, it is useful to draw on two bodies of theory. Moral panic theory addresses alarms about groups or activities that transgress social norms, proposing several characteristic features, but does not exp...

Drugs, crime, terrorism and war are all serious problems. What should be done about them? How about declaring war on them? Yet the war approach hasn’t fixed any of these problems but instead seems to have made things worse. The wars on drugs, crime, terrorism and war can be understood as persistent panics. They each share features with what are cal...

Military forces are sometimes called out to confront unarmed civilian protesters, a contingency for which they may or may not be prepared. Studies of civil-military relations have focused on relations between civilian and military elites, with interactions between armed forces and civilian protesters given little or no attention. The objective here...

The mainstream response to the Covid-19 pandemic can be understood as a paradigm in which distancing, masking and vaccination are central. Alternative perspectives, including boosting natural immunity and addressing adverse reactions, are marginalised.

Some viewpoints about COVID-19 are being censored, especially by tech companies such as Facebook and Google. Some of those being censored are calling foul. To understand more about struggles over information about Covid, it is useful to look at tactics used to either reduce or increase outrage over censorship.

In recent decades, civil resistance, also known as nonviolent action, has become more widely used among social movements and recognised by researchers. Alexei Anisin has usefully offered a critique of civil resistance theory and practice. His ideas are used as a basis for reflection and deeper understanding of both strengths and weaknesses of this...

Wikipedia has been accused of being biased against challengers to scientific orthodoxy due to efforts by editors having affinities with the Skeptics movement. Examination of Wikipedia, including entries on fluoridation, the origin of AIDS and vaccination, reveals several characteristics typical of a Skeptics sensibility, including the definition of...

You're searching for the truth. What sources of information should you use and trust? Brian Martin recommends reflecting on a topic that you know a lot about and taking note of which information sources were useful or misleading. To illustrate this process of reflection, he tells of his own experiences learning about the effects of nuclear war, the...

The study of human evil, defined in a non-religious sense as serious damage to other people, animals and the environment, can be used to assess different social arrangements. Steven Bartlett's analysis of the pathologies of human behaviour and thought provides a fruitful starting point for examining social institutions. Systems based on hierarchy a...

It is with great sadness that we share the news of the death of Dr. Tracey Bretag, who passed away on October 7, 2020 at the age of 58. Dr. Tracey Bretag co-founded the International Journal for Educational Integrity in 2006, with Helen Marsden (now Helen Titchener), sharing co-editorship with her for several issues before assuming the role of Edit...

Much activism involves confrontations with opponents or authorities, for example occupations, pickets and rallies in which protesters sometimes shout aggressively toward perceived opponents. An alternative to confrontational activism can be built around seeking to meet human needs, including those of opponents, drawing on research and traditions in...

For 40 years I've been studying suppression of dissent. During this time I've talked with hundreds of whistleblowers and dissidents. I tell about my experiences and what I've learned.

In 2016, a group of five people calling themselves “Peace Pilgrims” entered a prohibited zone around Pine Gap, a US military base in Australia. They were arrested and tried for trespass. The story of this action and its aftermath is told with care and sympathy by Kieran Finnane in a new book titled Peace Crimes: Pine Gap, National Security and Diss...

Proponents of vaccination would like to educate parents with the aim of getting them to agree with the dominant view. This creates a tension with an alternative goal of education, to encourage people to think for themselves. The challenge of learning about vaccination is increased by the public debate in which proponents and critics diverge dramati...

Official channels are things like grievance procedures, ombudsmen and courts. They are supposed to resolve problems and provide justice. However, trust in official channels can be misplaced: in many cases they may give only an illusion of a solution. In Official Channels, Brian Martin tells what he has learned about formal procedures set up to deal...

Achieving good health can be thought of as a struggle against opponents — disease and unhealthy practices — that are imagined to be active agents, in a type of thought experiment. These opponents of health, to reduce outrage about their activities, draw on a standard set of tactics: cover-up of the threat, devaluation of victims, reinterpretation o...

Laws and legal systems can have a constraining effect on scientific research and harm the public interest. The overt use of the law against research often has a smaller impact than the indirect effects of laws. Examples from three areas – defamation, euthanasia, and intellectual property – illustrate how laws can hinder research. When researchers a...

Grants are essential for some scientists to do their research, and receiving them can be a mark of status. Grants are supposed to be awarded on merit, but there are many deviations from this ideal. There are a few publicized cases in which grants to dissident scientists have been blocked. Far more common, though difficult to prove, is routine bias...

Academic discussions concerning what to do about conspiracy theories often focus on whether or not to debunk them. Less often discussed are the methods, audiences and effectiveness of debunking efforts. To motivate a closer examination of the ‘how’ of debunking, a slightly different issue is addressed: conspiracy theory attributions (CTAs), which a...

A writing program based on brief regular writing sessions can greatly improve research productivity. Ten years’ experience with a program at the University of Wollongong provides insights into the benefits and challenges in supporting a new writing habit.

Death can be imagined as an active, scheming agent. Death in this picture is a powerful perpetrator of something feared, harmful and often horrible: causing lives to end prematurely. Research shows that powerful perpetrators — in areas ranging from sexual harassment to genocide — regularly use five types of methods to reduce public outrage: coverin...

Social defence is nonviolent community resistance to aggression and repression, as an alternative to military forces. Given the enormous damage caused by military systems, social defence is an alternative worth investigating and pursuing. Since the 1980s, Jørgen Johansen and Brian Martin have been involved in promoting social defence. In this book,...

After supervising many Ph.D. students, I discovered research on methods that make academics more productive. I invited my students to follow a writing programme designed to overcome tendencies towards procrastination and excessive perfectionism. The programme involves a shift from focusing on content to focusing on the mechanics and thoughts involv...

Claiming that someone subscribes to a conspiracy theory can be a potent method of denigration. I observed this process up close: the thesis of one of my PhD students was alleged to endorse a conspiracy theory, therefore discrediting it. Journalists, bloggers, petition signers, Wikipedia editors and scientists endorsed the allegations without assess...

The editor of the journal Prometheus organised a debate about shaken baby syndrome. Following the editor's informative introduction, there is a proposition paper by Waney Squier, "Shaken baby syndrome: causes and consequences of conformity". Then there are responses to Squier's paper from ten commentators, written independently. The result is a fas...

People untrained in social science frameworks and methods often make assumptions, observations or conclusions about the social world. “Bad social science” here refers to claims about society and social relationships that fall very far short of what social scientists consider good scholarship. This might be due to using false or misleading evidence,...

Humans cause immense damage to each other and to the environment. Steven James Bartlett argues that humans have an inbuilt pathology that leads to violence and ecosystem destruction that can be called evil, in a clinical rather than a religious sense. Given that technologies are human constructions, it follows that technologies can embody the same...

Speech at Australian universities is restricted in various ways. A few of them, such as student protests against visiting speakers, receive lots of attention. Others seldom do, such as defamation threats and cyber harassment. Self-censorship may be more significant than overt censorship. Those who want to raise awareness of hidden limitations on sp...

Background When promoting public health measures, such as reducing smoking, there are many different approaches, for example providing information, imposing legal restrictions, taxing products, and changing cultures. By analogy with evidence-based medicine, different approaches to campaigning for health promotion can be compared by obtaining eviden...

Media beat-ups are sensationalised stories that greatly exaggerate or misrepresent the significance of otherwise unremarkable events or issues. To illustrate how beat-ups can be analysed, a front-page story in Sydney's Daily Telegraph newspaper is examined in terms of its venue, the journalist and the content of the story. The features of a beat-up...

New diseases in humans and animals have been the subject of considerable research as well as policy development and popular attention. Researchers commonly proceed on the basis of plausible assumptions about mechanisms, pathways, and dangers but seldom question the assumptions themselves. Studies in the history and sociology of science show that re...

Systematically biased editing, persistently maintained, can occur on Wikipedia while nominally following guidelines. Techniques for biasing an entry include deleting positive material, adding negative material, using a one-sided selection of sources, and exaggerating the significance of particular topics. To maintain bias in an entry in the face of...

When scientists engage in public advocacy, or indeed in any public comment on controversial issues, there is a risk they will come under attack. To reduce the possibility of reprisals, it is worthwhile preparing, in several ways, including learning from the experience of others and making mild comments to see the reaction. If there is a serious ris...

Most studies of activism and social movements give more attention to methods and strategies than to the development of skills. Yet skills are crucially important to the success of campaigns. Research on expert performance provides insights into what is required to become highly proficient at a well-defined set of skills. These insights are potentia...

Universities are seldom lauded publicly for maintaining good processes and practices; instead, media stories commonly focus on shortcomings. Furthermore, universities, even when doing everything right, sometimes are unfairly targeted for criticism in circumstances in which making a public defence is difficult. A prominent case at the University of...

Intervening in the Australian vaccination debate, I found that STS perspectives helped me understand the controversy but gave little guidance on how to defend against attacks. Max Liboiron comments that preparation, including support networks, should precede interventions. I was well supported in my involvement in the vaccination debate, but those...

When I learned about a concerted campaign against Australian vaccination critics, I decided to intervene in the debate. As a result, some proponents of vaccination turned on me, making abusive comments and complaining to university officials. At several points in this experience, I had to make choices about how to intervene or respond. STS perspect...

The chapters in the section “Integrity Versus Fraud and Corruption” are introduced.

Many academics and other professionals are implicated in plagiarism, misrepresentation, and exploitation, yet research about this is limited compared to the large body of research on student cheating. In what can be called competitive plagiarism, academics, judges, politicians, journalists, and others use the words and ideas of others without adequ...

Economic and social inequality is a major problem, implicated in poverty, ill health and exploitation. Inequality has increased in many countries since the 1980s and it is also widely seen as unfair, yet action against it has been sporadic and often ineffective. To better understand why inequality has persisted, it is useful to look at tactics that...

Nonviolent action, despite its widespread use and successes, has received relatively little scholarly attention and financial support compared to military research and studies of conventional politics. Understanding the direction and content of knowledge about nonviolence is a project in the tradition of the sociology of knowledge that can help exp...

The chapters in the section “Integrity Versus Fraud and Corruption” are introduced.

Examines the concept of delusions as it applies to surveillance and assesses its impact on society.

Barbra Streisand's attempt to restrict online views of her residence on a public website had the paradoxical effect of leading to many more views than if she had done nothing. Subsequently, attempts at censorship that end up being counterproductive have been dubbed the "Streisand effect." To better understand the dynamics of the Streisand effect, w...

Political lying recurrently becomes a major issue in the media. Audience members seldom have first-hand information and hence rely on media stories to assess claims. Although background information may not be available, the tactics used by key players are more likely to be reported. Two models for analysing tactics are introduced, one based on meth...

Many publicly debated issues have implications for health, including smoking, pesticides, food additives, seat belts, fluoridation, vaccination and climate change. Campaigners on such issues use a variety of methods, including presenting evidence and arguments, denigrating opponents, lobbying and organising protests. In some cases, campaigners seek...

When the work and reputation of scientists suffer ritual degradation, a range of tactics can be deployed to resist and rework the psychological and social impacts. Five key resistance tactics to degradation in science are revealing degradation rituals, redeeming the reputation of the targeted scientist, reframing the degradation as unfair, redirect...

Dissenters from the dominant views about vaccination sometimes are subject to adverse actions, including abusive comment, threats, formal complaints, censorship, and deregistration, a phenomenon that can be called suppression of dissent. Three types of cases are examined: scientists and physicians; a high-profile researcher; and a citizen campaigne...

When nonviolent activists design an action that poses a dilemma for opponents—for example whether to allow protesters to achieve their objective or to use force against them with consequent bad publicity—this is called a dilemma action. These sorts of actions have been discussed among activists and in activist writings, but not systematically analy...

Political lying recurrently becomes a major issue in the media. Audience members seldom have first-hand information and hence rely on media stories to assess claims. Although background information may not be available, the tactics used by key players are more likely to be reported. Two models for analysing tactics are introduced, one based on meth...

Struggles over euthanasia can be examined in terms of tactics used by players on each side of the issue to reduce outrage from actions potentially perceived as unjust. From one perspective, the key injustice is euthanasia itself, especially when the person or relatives oppose death. From a different perspective, the key injustice is denial of eutha...

Some academic supervisors take undue credit for the work of their research students, causing damage to their careers and morale. Students should consider whether to acquiesce, leave, complain, or resist. Students should be prepared for supervisor tactics of cover-up, devaluation, reinterpretation, official channels, and intimidation. Options for ad...

Ideally, public health debates are conducted civilly and focus on the evidence and the public good. In practice, many debates deviate markedly from this approach, for example with personal denigration of opponents. To help assess methods used in public health debates, a classificatory system of ideal types is introduced, with the categories of deli...

When a crisis develops, what sort of governance—what sort of system for running society—is most resilient? Does centralized control give the best prospect of survival? Or is something more decentralized needed?1

As the online profiles of organisations become more important, so do their vulnerabilities to online attack. A wide range of online methods can be used to attack the credibility of an organisation, deter participation by its members and undermine its operations. A case study from the Australian vaccination debate is used to illustrate the operation...

Brian Martin is professor of social sciences at the University of Wollongong. He is interested in the dynamics of power, particularly strategies for challenging repression and exploitation. He has worked on dissent in science and on whistleblowing for many years.

Challenges to US imperialism based on armed struggle have been largely unsuccessful. A much more promising strategy is non-violent popular action, which has only begun to be taken seriously for its potential long-term effectiveness. Six case studies - the Vietnam war, nuclear weapons, East Timor, Iraq, Puerto Rico and the so-called Arab Spring - il...

Campaigners on public health issues face a number of dilemmas when tactical choices in public debating involve uncomfortable mixtures of benefits and costs. Key dilemmas for campaigners are whether to acknowledge weaknesses in their own position, whether to advocate research to address claims by opponents, whether to acknowledge vested interests on...

What should you do when you or your organization is subject to lengthy, published criticism that you think is seriously distorting and misleading? The three main options are to ignore the criticisms, to counter-attack, and to respond with information and arguments. To make a choice, it is important to assess the way audiences’ perceptions are lik...

What should you do when you or your organization is subject to lengthy, published criticism that you think is seriously distorting and misleading? The three main options are to ignore the criticisms, to counter-attack, and to respond with information and arguments. To make a choice, it is important to assess the way audiences’ perceptions are likel...

Participation in decision-making has the potential to contribute to greater happiness. To explore this connection, we examine three areas: the family, the workplace and politics. In each of these areas, happiness research suggests that greater participation should increase happiness, most directly via the channels of personal relationships and help...