Taboos and self-censorship among U.S. psychology professors
journals.sagepub.com
journals.sagepub.com
1. “The tendency to engage in sexually coercive behavior likely evolved because it conferred some evolutionary advantages on men who engaged in such behavior.”
2. “Gender biases are not the most important drivers of the under-representation of women in STEM fields.”
3. “Academia discriminates against Black people (e.g., in hiring, promotion, grants, invitations to participate in colloquia/symposia).”
4. “Biological sex is binary for the vast majority of people.”
5. “The social sciences (in the United States) discriminate against conservatives (e.g., in hiring, promotion, grants, invitations to participate in colloquia/symposia).”
6. “Racial biases are not the most important drivers of higher crime rates among Black Americans relative to White Americans.”
7. “Men and women have different psychological characteristics because of evolution.”
8. “Genetic differences explain non-trivial (10% or more) variance in race differences in intelligence test scores.”
9. “Transgender identity is sometimes the product of social influence.”
10. “Demographic diversity (race, gender) in the workplace often leads to worse performance.”`
> Professors strongly disagreed on the truth status of 10 candidate taboo conclusions: For each conclusion, some professors reported 100% certainty in its veracity and others 100% certainty in its falsehood.
So it's worth contextualizing these with the note that there's _disagreement_ about whether or not any of these statements is actually correct or not. But it's not 50/50: Some of the statements had higher overall belief ("Biological sex is binary for most people" being the most widely-believed among survey participants, with 66%), and some had much lower belief ("demographic diversity .. worse performance" being the lowest, at 21%).
(Table 2 in the article, about 1/3 of the way down)
It would have been more interesting if in addition to capturing the professor’s position they captured the professor’s perception of the majority position, to see if the professor believed they were part of a silent majority or in the minority, but if they did I skimmed past that part.
It's not how logic works, but it's how human psychology seems to work. Or perhaps that's taboo too? I don't know. IANAP
I can see why that's okay for the purposes of this study, but I hope it's not indicative of the field's typical rigor.
2. Maybe it is, but not sure if that needs to be a problem.
3. No, at least admittance rate of blacks vs asians would make one believe the opposite is true
4. Yes for the vast majority.
5. Probably, but most conservative philosophy is boring and backwards anyway.
6. Are we counting a history of oppression as part of racial biases here?
7. Euh yeah, how is this even controversial?
8. I don't/can't know, but it would surprise me if it was higher then 10%.
9. I would not classify epigenetic as a social influence, so no. (maybe use the word environmental here)
10. No, but unit cohesion can help performance a lot.
I hope this helps
FTFY
If someone were so uncouth to ask the question, there is a prescribed "correct" answer for others to immediately repeat, mantra-like, that will avoid social and professional opprobrium.
That's not a criticism. That was the point of the post. That a lot of people read a question, and allow emotion to get the better of them. (I would argue that nearly all people do this.)
Just as a for instance, you answered "no" to 3. This was based on, again, according to you, "admittance rates of blacks vs asians". But if you read the question, it was about discrimination in "academia". Point being, you had your preconceived narrative, which would be confirmed if you took "academia" to mean undergraduate admissions. And people who answer "yes" have their preconceived narrative, which would be confirmed if you took "academia" to mean, say, hiring into academia from a pool of people who already received a PhD. (Even those receiving a PhD from the same department in the same school.)
The question as posed, is not answerable in an objective manner without qualifications. But you gave an answer, which will be taken as an answer without qualifications. Which evokes claims of bias and on and on and on. For instance, will you sit on a hiring panel for your department after such an answer? And, at root, the trouble is only due to the question being an unfocused question, calibrated to evoke an emotional reaction and an almost instinctual deviation from scientific rigor. Not really due to the biases or baser instincts of people offering an answer of yes or no to said question.
My recommendation:
We should stop with all the sensitivity training, and instead have yearly reinforcement training on the principles of scientific rigor. Training where we work through just these sorts of exercises so that people can see how easily they can be moved away from the scientific method if they're not paying attention.
the point of the study is that there may be some -- emphasis on some -- evidence in favor of those controversial views, but attempting to air or even attempting a discussion about them leads to immediate backlashes.
I once tried to have a discussion about whether opposable thumbs were partly successful because they make survivable rape easier. It didn't go well. We never did make it to the merits or demerits of the actual argument.
But unfortunately very often people don't have the patience to do this with a civil discussion and instead they cut the discussion short by just painting the interlocutor as somebody who must be a monster to even bring up such a topic in the first place.
And I understand why that's the case. Sometimes (often?) that's actually true. Sometimes we're just tired of bullshit flooding and rebuttal asymmetry.
But often I just think we're shutting down interesting explorations and we're ill-equipped as a society to have discussions which are truly hypothetical and neutral genuine devil-advocacy. Probably we're so much used to the abuse of those genuine techniques by people who just want to flood the scene with true bullshit.
I think those leaps underline how taboo the topic is.
So the only conceivable reasons to raise such a bizarre topic all involve you being a very unpleasant person to converse with -- the most generous I can think of being an unearned sense of intellectual superiority simply by the fact of raising an idea you see as taboo.
For instance there has recently been a lot of controversy around the claim by J.K. Rowling that studies show that transgender males have the same rates of sexual predation as other males. Understanding of the balance of biological versus social influence informs that debate.
To improve our selves we must know our selves.
????
For example:
> “Transgender identity is sometimes the product of social influence.”
I think you could find trans people themselves who might to some extent agree with that - I've more than once heard of people who knew themselves to be deeply miserable before ever hearing about transness, then discovering it, finding it "clicked", transitioning, and becoming much happier as a result. Does that qualify as "social influence"? They might not have transitioned if they hadn't known it was a possibility.
There are then two political views derived from this:
- the rightwing view that people should be prevented from knowing about the possibility of transness, especially as children, in order to discourage them from transitioning
- the leftwing view that, as part of the totality of the human experience, it is useful to include a description of it in the education given to children to help them understand their own process of puberty
But all sorts of things could be said to be "social influence". "Eating healthily is sometimes the product of social influence". "Turning up to events on time is sometimes the product of social influence". "High income is sometimes the product of social influence" (there are entire books sold on this thesis!)
The statement on its own is a semantic trap for assuming a whole bunch of things follow from that statement which can then be used to condemn people who agree/disagree with it.
I don't think that is what is meant with the statement, but rather, that they mean the people are identifying as trans due to their peers, rather than actually being dysphoric.
As an anecdote, for me that's almost what happened, but I was just miserable for other reasons (depression). In todays climate of affirmation being seemingly the only socially acceptable choice, I likely would've started transitioning and become even more miserable.
This is one of the reasons why I REALLY dislike the current paradigm of affirmation first, rather than actually checking whether the problems are caused by dysphoria or something else.
Along with that, the constantly repeated claim of puberty blockers being totally reversible (They are only in the medical sense, as in hormone production goes back to normal, but that claim still misses the fact that the time spent with reduced hormones has a measureable effect on the development of the child, as in, you won't "catch up" on puberty) is leading to more and more kids being treated with puberty blockers without a proper evaluation, because "there is no harm in it".
Yes it ought to happen between a professional and the person. And the real world is still a messy place where you can be influenced by non-professionals.
[1] https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/02/11/new-canadian-law-coul...
I think this is massively overstating how widespread affirmation is, at all, and also lacking any assessment of what proportion of people is "some".
* There is no cushy job waiting on the other side of a Psychology degree for most people, but more likely a job in an unrelated field.
* Psychology is about the softest science we have, to the point that it eschews the general rigor of the scientific process in favor of what can only be described as pathological bike-shedding. Can you remember the last thing that came out of this field that wasn’t just some form of moving labels around?
* Feelings are unfalsifiable, and humans are known liars and drug addicts. Some people will absolutely lie every chance they can to get what they want, and will even make a living out of doing that (for instance, illegally selling prescription medication on the streets that never should have been prescribed in the first place). Dishonest people like this will inevitably be the same people providing the “evidence” for some of these studies. And so an already soft science becomes even softer because professional grifters have an incentive to taint the samples by lying (even if they are misguided and ultimately wrong about gaining any benefit).
The students whose critical thinking abilities did not make them aware of these things, or worse, did inform them but they didn’t care… those are the people who end up publishing Psychology papers.
This is an interesting one. Diversity is definitely beneficial to large international corporations, so the main question here is "at what granularity should we apply diversity". Small team level is probably not the right place to apply diversity.
Or it could be "what should we sacrifice (if anything) to obtain diversity", or "how fast should we try to obtain diversity".
(Or even: "what kinds of diversity matter? Race and gender -- or ideas, values, and experiences?")
A suitable research leader for such a controversial topic, for sure.
Not a left-right thing, I think we all have our poison. But also something that seems more like a rallying cry for the most frustrated rather than an unmotivated invitation to the undecided.
And committing violence?
I don't think so.
Motivation matters. I may care deeply about the environment but if I act from a place of wanting to coerce others, I sow seeds of resistance to the very thing I am trying to achieve.
Q: What is the most important priority?
Liberal A: Letting kindergarten teachers help kids transition their gender.
Conservative A: Banning abortion and contraceptives.
I mean, we tech nerds can maybe relate with our struggle of privacy, open source etc.?
Most people don't care about surveillance, nor have they heard of open source. But being a tech nerd, I absolutely do think they are very importang for the whole world to embrace.
But on a philosophical level I can see that other people have other priorities. Or a different angle how to solve things.
Many would say climate change is the most important problem, to which I would say, open source (hardware) has the best chance of solving this crisis. Making the tech broadly avaiable. (And anti surveillance so we do not end up in totalitarian states while trying to solve the other problems)
But to a conservative he sees no base of anything, if the foundations of (his) morals are destroyed.
In reality people care more about the prosperity of their local area, access to hospitals, etc
I've personally learned to be careful about casually binary sorting people - life isn't that clean in my experience.
There was no issue until state Republicans tried to weaponize the state to censor people and make trans kids' lives miserable for political points. Schools let trans kids play sports on their own, they stocked informational material on their own, doctors made their own standards for trans care on their own, and Republicans weren't happy about it so they brought down the legislation hammer.
So the joke either needs to pick something stilly liberals actually push for, or the conservatives issue needs to be one that uses exaggerated liberal framing like, "make women the property of their husbands again."
I would like the option of a party that wants to focus on things like preventing fraud and ensuring freedom, but seemingly across the western world such things are uninteresting.
Where's the profit in that?
1) dismantle the federal state
2) direct democratic rule of the states. A hybrid system like in Switzerland.
In general, decentralisation and democratisation.
solution: straight to "dismantle the country".
genius. this is some serious, next level shillbot-ing
I understand those a-hole’s objectives and can emotionally write them off as a-holes, but the way people in the West play along as useful idiots does get under my skin
The endgame of that seems to be that you have two sides with some completely crackpot stances that they (hopefully?) don't even really believe in themselves, but use as a sort of identity marker.
I have to confess that personally I find some of it utterly laughable and it's hard for me to engage seriously.
Like, yeah, of course abortion should be legal, but also, being "non-binary" is just a little bit weird.
Both of those camps are, well, to put it politely, in search of a hobby.
Liberalism is, or should be, an ideology of democracy, human rights, and personal freedom. Conservative is, or should be, valuing the rule of law, traditional mores, and personal integrity. These two sets of values are in tension, but they aren't opposites. Giving up one doesn't automatically give you the other. If you're careless, you can lose both.
There's nothing "liberal" about a cancel culture ideology which equates speech with violence. And there's nothing "conservative" about a cult of personality that worships a mockery of moral character and undermines the rule of law.
Utterly unsurprising to me.