Taboos and Self-Censorship Among U.S. Psychology Professors | Hacker News Reader

Taboos and Self-Censorship Among U.S. Psychology Professors

journals.sagepub.com

94 pointskvee61 comments

The 10 questions will get you banned/flagged/ousted from even normal conversation amongst friends or casual groups, of course people are not going to risk their professional reputations with them.

Discovering the truth of these questions is not really worth ruining your life.

Look at James Watson, even if you win a Nobel Prize, your career can still be ruined if you say the wrong thing.

Of course, without heretics, we could still all believe in a geocentric universe, or even a flat Earth.

This is one of the more wild social concepts that the modern age of social media has super charged. At its core: what’s the acceptable line between presenting counter-views versus heresy? And one level up: what’s the responsibility of the audience to consider any counter, even heresy?

There are consequences in every choice.

Not sure it is super charged at all considering many of these heretical figures were killed. I feel like it's easier than ever to have a fringe opinion. We're in a day and age where people unironically believe in Qanon

From "Kolmogorov Complicity And The Parable Of Lightning" (https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-...):

"Did Giordano Bruno die for his astronomical discoveries or his atheism? False dichotomy: you can’t have a mind that questions the stars but never thinks to question the Bible. The best you can do is have a Bruno who questions both, but is savvy enough to know which questions he can get away with saying out loud. And the real Bruno wasn’t that savvy."

Speaking your mind is something you can afford only once you already own a fortune, see e.g. all what is happening around J.K. Rowling.

I am not against taboos. Taboos can be good. However, it can be a problem when what is considered taboo expands to encompass basically everything.

It’s fine for certain topics to be taboos in polite conversation around the family dinner table or at a social event.

But in a professional setting, particularly amongst scientists and academics, it seems essential that difficult conversations can be had openly.

What you say is true, but tragic. What is a professional reputation worth if one ignores inconvenient truths? No opinion (however lay or erudite) is deeply serious if truth is less important than ego preservation. Any system of thought that disregards truth is ultimately incoherent and will produce nothing of real value.

I think that self-censorship is practically universal and a core tenant of our social behavior.

Somehow I think some group(s) of people have gotten it in their head that they are the only ones who have to self-censor and that they are a victim for it, but I think if you challenge yourself you can come up with hundreds of times self-censoring in social situations is the obviously correct choice (political or not).

Think about it, from disallowing words like "hell", to talking about death, to discussing sex, to oversharing, there actually is a very small percentage of combinations of words that are appropriate conversation.

I guess being a grammar Nazi is probably another thing that should be self-censored, but... it's "tenet", not a renter.

The most surprising result to me is how scholars tended to report that moral concerns that a study’s conclusions could harm vulnerable groups was NOT a valid reason to avoid publishing (M = 29.61, SD = 27.68). I assumed this was a primary motivation for all the tiptoeing around taboo topics.

I’d assume it would be due to blowback from peers and sponsors. Vulnerable groups by definition aren’t those.

When even the real faculties of science have become financially driven and corrupted you know that soft 'science' like psychology is even worse.

It's very amusing to read about this in the midst of the replication crisis.

They might as well have done the same study on tarot card readers

We have to look not far from our own field to see a replication crisis brewing. The results in ML papers are obviously moving in the same direction, all while beating SOTA by miniscule amounts.

IMO psychology became a lot less interesting when it tried to become more scientific.

Is it meaningful to do linear regressions through clouds like the ones shown in Figure 1?

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/17456916241252...

Wow! To expect that a meaningful signal can precipitate out of such a wide noise field seems almost comically credulous.

I'm most impressed that they had the temerity to recruit that figure as 'support' for their conclusions.

the slope is the covariance, that is meaninful.

An odd article. Their previous work hits a lot of the same notes. But the selective transparency on the methods - for instance, only briefly describing how they arrived at these "taboo conclusions" - suggests they're more interested in stirring the pot and keeping these assertions circulating under the guise of suppressed science. (My mistake, they relocated the pilot study to supp mat, but it is not reassuring to read.)

"A vocal minority and silent majority may have created a seemingly hostile climate against taboo conclusions and the scholars who forward them, even if the silent majority has great contempt for the vocal minority. Future research should test these possibilities more directly."

This kind of editorializing feels out of place and very revealing. This retraction is perhaps indicative of the general quality of the work as well:

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/095679761989791...

> how they arrived at these "taboo conclusions"

I agree with many of the "taboo" conclusions, so just like the paper I am not commenting on their veracity when I say these are common beliefs held in many righter leaning academic circles. There's nothing wrong with polling people about these ideas, but I would have rather the respondents be given more open ended prompts about what they thought were taboo ideas vs what the researcher wanted them to think about.

Literally 100% of published papers in psychology, sociology and related fields will have "editorializing" equal or greater to the line you quoted. This one likely only stood out to you because it went against your beliefs while others align to them, or because you don't regularly read such publications to be familiar with norms.

Psychology is privatized. It consist of one guy writting queries running against annonymized userdata at palantir. Ocassionally he has a mental breakdown and turns into a grandfather clock writing strange gobledegock on a message board with a orange border. He is not happy, but then again, those are just the gears grinding making sound.

Is self-censorship a bad thing?

Suppose you had a finding that infidelity leads to "better" genes for the kids. I imagine most scientists wouldn't want to publish that paper because it's unpleasant to think about and seems to challenge a core tenant of our society (fidelity).

Or for example suppose one found out a huge correlation between IQ and a political party. No matter which direction they found it, most researchers would probably rightly self-censor that on the basis that it's not really a productive thing to try to put out there.

A few of the examples in the paper really are important questions in my opinion (understanding gender identity on as scientific a level as we can), but most of them aren't. For example I don't think question 6 is important -- what's important is research on reducing crime rates.

I think claiming a certain race commits disproportionate violent crime is like pointing out one gender commits disproportionate crime. True or not, it kinda doesn't matter, and when somebody brings it up you have to ask if their motivation is to reduce crime or grind an axe.

To answer your question: yes. Yes it is a bad thing.

Things that are untrue but you can't question for the sake of societal cohesion are called "religion", not "science".

I'm just not convinced it really is a problem that 1% of topics are taboo.

I think taboos exist for a reason, and it's mostly good for us as a species to collectively wall-off certain categories of behavior/thought/speech.

Correction: you think taboos you happen to agree with exist for a reason.

For example, say you lived in modern-day Russia where it is taboo to say that Putin can make a mistake and that the West is not all-evil. Still a good taboo? Even if it is accepted by the majority?

Or if we go back pre-Putin in Russia, Lysenkoism [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism], a truly bizarre ideology where it was taboo to discuss natural selection - getting 3000+ academics sent to the gulag, many outright executed, and leading to large scale declines in crop output contributing to famines. Including contributing to the Great Famine in China which killed 10’s of millions [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine].

Or, as the wiki article quotes - “Lysenko claimed that the concept of a gene was a "bourgeois invention", and he denied the presence of any "immortal substance of heredity" or "clearly defined species", which he claimed belong to Platonic metaphysics rather than strictly materialist Marxist science. ”

Whose taboos? Whose society?

Anatomy (and medicine in general) would have stagnated if not for people willing to violate the taboo against desecrating corpses.

Yes it’s a bad thing, both scientifically and societally. For science, having taboo subjects limits our ability to understand the world. For society, it obfuscates what an effective solution to societal problems looks like.

Bien-pensants will tell us "Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?" But it's impossible to deny forever what the lying eyes say.

Example: From a 2018 open letter by an eminent geneticist, "How Genetics Is Changing Our Understanding of 'Race" <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/opinion/sunday/genetics-r...>:

>I am worried that well-meaning people who deny the possibility of substantial biological differences among human populations are digging themselves into an indefensible position, one that will not survive the onslaught of science. I am also worried that whatever discoveries are made — and we truly have no idea yet what they will be — will be cited as “scientific proof” that racist prejudices and agendas have been correct all along, and that those well-meaning people will not understand the science well enough to push back against these claims.

> "Younger, more left-leaning, and female faculty were generally more opposed to controversial scholarship."

That's so counterintuitive, I simply cannot believe it's true.

I have a large and very eclectic group of buddies, ranging from one extreme to the other, in term of politic, life style, believes, education, etc.

Anecdotally, this is true in my circle.

Left leaning people around me think they are more open minded, but really they just have a different set of things they accept. They have the same number of icks, just not at the same place.

The big gap is in how they behave when in contact with things they don't like.

And right leaning people have been so far more capable of cooperating with those who don't match their values.

Also, on paper, left leaning have expressed more humane values, espacially when very general or abstract. But in the day to day, when it comes to the mondain or practical, I've seen the sexist or racist guys help more my muslim or girl friends that the ones saying every body is equal.

It weirds me out.

I too always got the impression that 'cancellations' were spearheaded by young, leftists. Not sure where gender comes in to play though.

I refer you to the definitive resource on this issue- the movie "Mean Girls". This movie is the key to understanding the current age.

Early on perhaps that was true, but cancel culture seems to have broad appeal across the political spectrum these days.

Although you could make an argument that it still leans left on the public side, with more of a focus on private death threats and harassment on the right. They don't approach the problem of crushing dissent with exactly the same strategy.

> Not sure where gender comes in to play though.

women tend to be more left leaning than men.

https://www.economist.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=360,quality=80...

I find it very unlikely that you have exposure both to the extreme left and the extreme right.

That does seem unlikely. The extreme left is a good bit smaller than the extreme right. The vast, vast majority of Democrats that MAGA folks like to paint as communists are in fact damn near as conservative as they are on most issues. You could probably put all the actual communists in America in a single stadium, with space left over.

I would say that the stupidest of the left is smarter than the stupidest on the right, but being smart is not what we are talking about.

This site proves you can be pretty smart and damn hard to colaborate with :)

Also I would argue that being a communist is not the same distance from the center as being a maga.

But more importantly, this is irrelevant.

Cause I'm not american.

Communists as in ceasing land from everyone and putting it in the hands of the party elite?

I don't have nazis if this is what you are refering to. Just like I don't have murderers and rapists.

But I do have communists, anarchists on one side, and royalists (people in favor or a king) and pro putin on the other. I have anti-vax and phd in physics, millionaires and state help seekers, cops and people making their own amphetamin, people going to all protests and those telling off illegal immigrants to the police.

It's like saying it's both hot and cold. You can argue I don't live in the sahara or in the north pole, but I live in France.

I know tankies and I know white nationalists, do they count? I don't approve of their political beliefs in either case but I can get along with them, as in coexist with them in a workplace or hobby space, if they behave better than they believe (most seem to, their beliefs are mostly hot air and the way they actually treat people is more egalitarian than they might care to admit themselves.)

> And right leaning people have been so far more capable of cooperating with those who don't match their values.

Don't follow US federal politics much, I take it?

I do, the American make sure we can't miss it.

And of course, I specifically states it's an anecdotate about people around me.

I don't find it surprising and it fits my experience with millennial, and younger, Anglo sphere women. If you bring topics like "race" or gender, you had better stay within heavily policed boundaries.

I don't even disagree with the goals of these people, but I think there is such ridged ideological conformity, that the quality of the thinking suffers. In other words, I am very skeptical of the solutions that they propose because I don't think they have the freedom to really consider these problems from every angle.

It goes both ways. I can't politely criticize capitalism or bring up really basic feminist critiques of the world without most of my conservative friends and family getting agitated. If I do get someone to engage with me, I get the same half dozen talking points I've heard 100s of times.

Absolutely. Everyone wants to be the thought police if they think they can get away with it. Before Bari Weiss became a free speech warrior, she was trying to get pro-Palestine professors fired.

I'm genuinely surprised you find that counterintuitive - that would have been my exact guess.

I wonder if they're less successful in finding an advisor or related to publishing efforts. Not sure if the paper accounts for survivorship bias.

That definitely matches my experience (in areas outside of psychology)…

> That's so counterintuitive, I simply cannot believe it's true.

Science, ladies and gentlemen.

It turns entirely on what is meant by 'controversial.'

Applying a 1950's sense of the word would indeed be hard to square with the rest of the statement. But a 2020's sense of the word completely aligns with my own experience both as a student and as someone with several minority professors as close family.

The most vocal and internally-conformist group, by far, are white female grad students and professors under 40 or 35 or so. Change any single parameter and the population of anti-controversial (in the current sense) voices drops sharply.

Also familiar is a general undercurrent of sentiment among departmental and field-adjacent colleagues that the behavior of this group is noxious and counterproductive, even among those who broadly sympathize with them. Along with a resigned and quiet dread that nothing can be done about it.

It's called sarcasm, people.

Higher testosterone is correlated with more willingness to tolerate dissent. And average testosterone has dropped precipitously in the last 30 years.

At least none of you studied evo psych in college... /facepalm

And its legitimacy didn't matter. It conflicted with the blank-slate hypothesis, therefore it had to go...

The last thread holding together the illusion of fair meritocracy in our society is tabla rasa.

Good point.

Cancel Culture at its best!

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