Is Social Psychology Biased Against Republicans?
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
A comment meant to combat Haidt's criticism ends up embodying it.
However I think here the issue is that the lack of conservatives in social psychology obscures the fact that it is a discipline with almost no real content -- they ask questions and do studies which can provide any result they wish, so the group of people engaged in the science just imprint their own beliefs on it -- getting 'data' and 'studies' that exactly conform with their worldview, not coincidentally. In order to provide basic rigor to the science (and to provide any hope of ending the current replication crisis) there needs to be scientists employing the same methods but who expect radically different (socially conservative) outcomes. Currently the best way to see which method or explanation a psychology study finds evidence for is not to read the study, but rather to read the bio of the first author, and find his or her pet theory. This is the problem at hand. The lack of intellectual diversity in the discipline just allows the intellectual farce to plod along unexposed.
Interesting. I wonder if those same people would explain a lack of gender diversity in tech as "women aren't interested in tech", or an analogous feeling in other fields? I guess I do not have an understanding for how much of that reaction is a general attitude towards diversity versus a reactionary stance in regards to the suggestion of a lack of diversity in one's own domain of work/expertise/culture/experience.
> But the percentages varied. Regarding economic affairs, approximately nineteen per cent called themselves moderates, and eighteen per cent, conservative. On foreign policy, just over twenty-one per cent were moderate, and ten per cent, conservative. It was only on the social-issues scale that the numbers reflected Haidt’s fears: more than ninety per cent reported themselves to be liberal, and just under four per cent, conservative.
Certainly the social issues are more extreme, but having a ~70% to 10% ratio of liberal to conservative thinking for foreign policy is still very lopsided. I think all three categories would be considered too lopsided, not just the last one.
Contrary to the declaration of independence, it is not self-evident that all people are equal. We can say that the lack of women in tech is primarily a result of cultural reasons because we have evidence that there is minimal innate, relevent, difference. We have not shown this to be the case with political parties. Furthermore, we have reason to believe that this is not the case, because political parties carry with them values and ideologies.
>Certainly the social issues are more extreme, but having a ~70% to 10% ratio of liberal to conservative thinking for foreign policy is still very lopsided. I think one all three categories would be too lopsided, not just the last one.
Is there a reason that 50%-50% is ideal? Consider the climate change debate; I do not consider it a problem that the scientific community is lopsided on this issue. Simmilarly, it may be the case that an understanding of these fields tends to make people lean liberal.
You're confusing political belief with scientific opinion. There is nothing wrong with nearly everyone holding one scientific opinion. I would say there is something wrong with a lack of diversity (political or otherwise).
False equivalence in scientific opinion isn't any different from the political sphere, its just that many political issues are actually more highly debated because of a lack of hard science behind them.
Further, still a flawed argument; part of the main point of science is to consider questions that may be emotionally loaded or painful in a scientific manner. Forbidding certain streams of thought because it could conceivably be used to support a politically unpopular position is unscientific. At the very least you ought to acknowledge that is the case, rather than try to pretend that you have not somehow left science behind, and pretend that you will suffer no consequences from that because of the sheer, self-evident rightness of your beliefs. (And if those last six words don't at least make you pause, you don't have a scientific mind.)
However political beliefs are a combination of values and factual beliefs. For example, consider gun control. Part of the debate is a value debate on who has the responsibility of protecting the people (if you believe that it is the government's responsibility, you are less likely to be pro gun than if you believe it is an individuals responsibility). However, there is also a factual debate on if private ownership of guns actually protects people.
Those academics survive who can sell, who can get grants and budgets, who can get paid and who can hire. It is nice to believe that these abilities are correlated with the ability to discover new truths. Over the longer term it certainly is and in hard sciences moreso, but in the short and medium term and in subjects as loosey goosey as social psychology (where being wrong has virtually no measurable consequence) it is certainly less so.
The conclusion then might be that liberals, rather than being better truth seekers, are simply better at funnelling public money through their offices.
This generalizes - if we view markets ( and this are one, I think - of a sort ) as control-feedback systems, everything is easy until you get large lags and higher uncertainty due to lag. If the lag itself is highly uncertain, abandon hope all ye who enter here.
The hard part is always separating the stories we tell ourselves about things from the nature of the things themselves.
Social conservatism generally seeks to preserve existing power relationships. Science is about discovering new understanding.
Unless we've already passed the peak of understanding of the human condition and factored that into our politics (which is an implication of conservatism), social psychology will keep challenging conservatives.
Political views are not just different flavors. They have structural implications about what ideas one is willing to entertain. It would be much more disturbing if there was not bias here.
The lack of self awareness on HN is profound. Sure, confirmation bias exists, but that's mostly a problem for other guys, not me.
It would be like asking for the split of ideologies for people writing articles in "Handgun Today". The very nature of the field implies an ideology.
This is in fact necessary for academic freedom. Just because you fund something at some university doesn't mean you get to dictate everyone's public expression there, as if that institution were a corporate subsidiary.
However, in practice, those who are close to some particular project involving an outside agency probably face repercussions if they express criticism of that agency.
But for the sake of argument, yes, conservatives tend to be biased against statist academia because they are aware that since academia wouldnt exist without a state it is biased toward the state and against contra-statists.
The notion that conservatives would indeed be biased against an independent, non-statist academia, simply because they are -as is often implied- biased against knowlege itself, is not convincing.
This is a complete straw man. Nobody is saying conservatives would be biased against 'knowledge itself'.
What is being suggested is that they would be biased against social psychological research with the potential to change ideas about power relations away from supporting the status quo.
Furthermore, if as you say, conservatives are supportive of this research being done, but just object to 'statist' academia, you will easily be able to prove that by pointing us to the independent institutions they have funded.
Its a synergy. The state provides the academia funds nobody else would voluntarily provide them. In return, academia produces statists. Cue vicious circle of win-win.
They wouldnt be in academia if adacemia had to actually earn the money it needs to exist.
There are so many generalizations that this statement loses any value. Also state == leftism? What about fascist and quasi-fascist states?
Precisely.
> What about fascist and quasi-fascist states?
Fascism, communism, nazism, socialism, etc, are subsets of leftism/statism.
> Precisely.
The effort of the American Right to coopt libertarian identity (one of a series of such attempts that arose in an effort to regain electoral ground in the realignment after the rise of the New Deal Coalition -- including the effort to coopt white racial identity in the Southern Strategy, and the effort to coopt Christian religious identity thereafter) clearly has met with some success.
In the real world, however, right authoritarianism and left libertarianism are real things.
> Fascism, communism, nazism, socialism, etc, are subsets of leftism/statism.
They are generally subsets of statism (presuming by "communism" you mean Leninism and its descendants; with Marxism-qua-Marxism the issue is less clear, and "communism" is even more general and includes some things which are probably more accurately seen as left-libertarian), but only some subsets of that list have any real relationship to the left.
Fascism and Nazism are probably best seen as pure authoritarian; each borrows rhetorical approaches from both the Left and the Right to support authoritarianism, but neither really orients toward the Right or Left in anyway that is distinguishable from its orientation toward authoritarianism, except perhaps to the extent that one sees nationalism vs. internationalism as tied to the right/left divide (there's some traditional association of nationalism with the Right and internationalism with the Left), as both Nazism and Fascism are strongly nationalist.
No, growth in institutional power is not "usually associated with the Left". Left and Right differ on who holds power and how it is used, authoritarian vs. libertarian split on the degree of institutional power.
In a sense, libertarian and left are both different generalizations of classical liberalism to a new environment -- in the environment in which classical liberalism arose, political and economic power were conjoined and distributing political power was equivalent to distributing economic power. Libertarianism (in ideal -- practical effects may differ) focusses on continuing distribution of formal political power by limiting the power of central political institutions even as economic power has become increasingly divorced from the central institutions, Leftism (again, in ideal) focusses on continuing distribution of economic power among individuals irrespective of whether its present locus in central political institutions or not.
Leftists will generally argue that distributing economic power is the best way of distributing political power, while Libertarians will argue the reverse.
That's not the only reason, though; many leftists do not actually believe in distributing political power at all. The position that the state has a complete monopoly on the use of force is an example of this.
I didn't mention lots of practical issues that might occur in implementing left or libertarian views. But that certainly isn't a requirement of left ideology in general, though there are specific left viewpoints that favor some form of consolidation as a means to distribution (left libertarians, which are an important and growing group, clearly do not generally favor consolidation even as an instrumental means to distribution.)
> That's not the only reason, though; many leftists do not actually believe in distributing political power at all.
There's certainly leftists who believe that liberalism through the establishment of democratic accountability of the State to the citizenry has already, in many cases, acheived the desirable distribution of formal political power so that the focus should not longer be on that, such that further distribution of such power is no longer desirable and may be counterproductive, sure. There are also leftists who don't believe that.
(The same is true, mutatis mutandis, with libertarians vis-a-vis economic power by way of its divorce from control by formal political power in many modern states.)
> The position that the state has a complete monopoly on the use of force is an example of this.
The position that the State is defined as an entity that has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force is a concept which predates the existence of leftism as a distinct offshoot of classical liberalism (and probably predates classical liberalism as well.) This definition of what the State is is not an example of anything in any ideology, since its not a value statement.
Insofar as some leftists (though neither hardcore left libertarians nor communists in the vein of Marx and Engels, both of whom believe in the ultimate abolition of the State) hold that the existence of a State as so defined is desirable, this indicates that there are limits to how much those leftists believe that centralized political power should be limited by reducing the power of institutions instead of distributing control over institutions, but even that is different from demonstrating an absence of a belief in "distributing political power at all".
Also, why would the position that the state be defined as such indicate that there are limits to how much centralized power should be limited?
Now you are just changing the definitions to suit your agenda. I see no point in the further discussion.
If it is not statist, what actually makes it "left"?
> anarcho-communism
Same question, how could a stateless communism possibly work?
In even Marxist theory, communism-as-a-system (communism-as-an-ideology is simply the ideology which seeks communism-as-a-system as its ultimate goal) is what happens to socialism (which uses the State) when it succeeds and the State withers away.
If the State hasn't withered away, you have (in Marxist parlance) socialism-as-a-system even if you have communism-as-an-ideology that motivates the present use of socialism-as-a-system. You can't have communism with a State.
(Whether you can have communism at all in practice is still an open question.)
The contradiction between the vocation and the good intentions of the administration on the one hand and the means and powers at its disposal on the other cannot be eliminated by the state, except by abolishing itself; for the state is based on this contradiction. It is based on the contradiction between public and private life, between universal and particular interests. For this reason, the state must confine itself to formal, negative activities, since the scope of its own power comes to an end at the very point where civil life and work begin. Indeed, when we consider the consequences arising from the asocial nature of civil life, of private property, of trade, of industry, of the mutual plundering that goes on between the various groups in civil life, it becomes clear that the law of nature governing the administration is impotence. For, the fragmentation, the depravity, and the slavery of civil society is the natural foundation of the modern state, just as the civil society of slavery was the natural foundation of the state in antiquity. The existence of the state is inseparable from the existence of slavery.
Lack of private property over the means of production would be a big difference.
( I got this here; I forget which essay it is http://home.earthlink.net/~flyingdragongoddess/indexa.html#p...)
Modern Movement Conservatism isn't very close to the sort of values that academia embraces. It's not even close to what an academic might consider Conservatism ( Burke, Oakeshott ).
A lot of Conservatives come from dealing with regulation and tax codes - that's unlikely to happen to academics.
And I still think Arnold Kling's Three-Axis Model is fantastic. http://www.amazon.com/Three-Languages-Politics-Arnold-Kling-...
http://wjh.harvard.edu/~jmitchel/writing/failed_science.htm
There's no hope of spotting or preventing bias if social psychologists are working like that so the fact that many social psychiatrists are "liberal" is going to skew the results of "experiments".
The bigger problem is that social science has few correction mechanism. Your biases in computer science will usually be quickly and brutally dealt with by an uncaring computer. Physicists have actual, definitive experiments. Social sciences are seemingly helpless in the face of p-hacking and other bullshittery, even outright fabrications.
Ideological bias of course makes it worse (vide Stapel's paper on racism[2]) but it's not the root cause.
[1] http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/aug/1/liberal-major...
[2] http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110407/full/news.2011.217.ht...
Unless, of course, you have a monopoly on a large desktop market. Then it will take some time.
The lack of young-earth creationists in science is very worrisome.
The Republican Party (as of now) is not inclusive. If you are not white, your English is not so great, or your sexual orientation is not heterosexual, or you are traveling and learning about other countries, or you are not born here, or you don't believe in creationism, or your religious views are not Christians then you are out.
And the worst thing is that they don't even notice that. Like ridiculing me about my accent and heritage and then asking "why you are not republican - we have similar views...". Yeah... I have a Trotsky book to sell you.
So if you are in academia you will be excluded by Republican Party because of the following:
- you don't believe in creationism
- your religious views are not Christians
- you are not born here
- you are married with somebody who is not born here
- you are traveling around the world
In short, Republican party is getting defined not by its policy but by its exclusion principle (and it is defined by Fox News - which is not helping Republican party at all).
The issue discussed is not whether someone is a registered Republican party voter, but the belief structure they have. Imagine that - there are foreign-born non-Christian conservatives who travel around the world.
Whether the rest of your points are true or just bigoted ranting (others may choose) is ultimately irrelevant.
What to say here?
[1] http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/05/11/romney-elabora...
The problem with our current crop of rightists and science and scholarship (sometimes perceived as "bias") is the "Fox News effect." Scientists and scholars wish to determine and understand reality---and reality has a well known Liberal bias. (Think climate change, evolution, etc., etc.)
I'm willing to listen to anyone, but I am going to judge them by the standards of science and scholarship. If they are not serious about those standards, they are only worth listening to in order to determine the latest right-wing myths.
Note there are certainly people on the left who are not members of the reality based community, but at this moment those on the right are the biggest threat to science and scholarship (I omit political topics) and, in the case of climate change, our lives
Nope - no bias to be found here in our neck of the woods!
Turning this around: perhaps conservatives are "more interested in new ideas" and "more intelligent", so they choose to work in other fields?
You don't say.
However, ideology can influence us, since we are not perfect at science. Without the strong objective feedback of the hard sciences, social psychology is particularly vulnerable.
The bias alleged in this article actually starts to look more plausible when you consider the history of social psychology and related fields. Back in the 1970s, it was taboo to mention ANY innate qualities of human nature. Gender was purely a social construction. Babies were identical in every way--people were different only because of their upbringing. Prominent biologists like E.O. Wilson who argued genes might play a role were attacked and demonized. Nothing could contradict this doctrine of the blank slate -- that we're born perfectly malleable. I highly recommend Steven Pinker's 2002 book, titled "The Blank Slate" [0] which brilliantly debunks this theory, and lays out the best characterization of human nature I've ever come across. Seriously, read this book, it is a masterpiece.
Anyway, from what I've read recently, it seems many fields like social psychology are still captive to lesser versions of the blank slate fallacy. Human nature is not as malleable as they think. Our instincts are still there (gotta eat, sleep, procreate), and even "higher" areas of the brain for things like language, emotion, and thought seem to be heavily innate (to think at all requires machinery, and there are many ways to craft that machinery). Also, genes really are more important than most seem to realize. The twin and adoption studies show that the majority of variation among people in intelligence and personality is due to genes. How your parents treated you and brought you up has almost no effect by the time you are an adult in important metrics like IQ and personality tests. Smart people are largely born smart.
These sort of "deterministic" ideas fly in the face of traditional liberal values. Topics like gender discrimination and societal inequality are undermined by these ideas, so that provides a reason for a liberal thinker to push back against them.
If the gender gap in computer science is due more to innate differences in interest than to discrimination, and if inequality of income is due more to innate differences in talent than differences in opportunity, then that makes it harder to argue for reform. I believe thinking along these lines is the major cause for bias today.
So yes, I agree social psychology is quite biased. In the future, we will look back with horror at how we let politics and ideology interfere with science.
[0]http://www.amazon.com/The-Blank-Slate-Modern-Denial/dp/01420...