From Ethnography to a Mathematical Model of Suspicious Review

Expert evaluation of scientific evidence rarely relies on methodological checks alone. Based on ethnographic research with Israeli medical bureaucrats reviewing pharmaceutical trial data, this talk shows how evaluators deliberately cultivate a stance of suspicion in order to determine whether evidence is “trustworthy enough” for policy decisions. Suspicion, I argue, functions not merely as mistrust but as a practical epistemic method guiding how reviewers search for omissions, inconsistencies, and possible manipulation. Building on this ethnographic insight, the talk then presents an emerging collaboration with Prof. Ruti Mayo (psychology, HUJI) and Prof. Gut Ron (Physics, HUJI), in which we offer a mathematical reconstruction of suspicious review that models evaluators’ review process when they distrust the evidence presented to them.