Social Scientist Sees Bias Within
February 7, 2011 By JOHN TIERNEY The NY Times EXCERPT: (Emphasis added)
SAN ANTONIO Some of the worlds pre-eminent experts on bias discovered an unexpected form of it at their annual meeting.
Discrimination is always high on the agenda at the Society for Personality and Social Psychologys conference, where psychologists discuss their research on racial prejudice, homophobia, sexism, stereotype threat and unconscious bias against minorities. But the most talked-about speech at this years meeting, which ended Jan. 30, involved a new outgroup.
It was identified by Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia who studies the intuitive foundations of morality and ideology. He polled his audience at the San Antonio Convention Center, starting by asking how many considered themselves politically liberal. A sea of hands appeared, and Dr. Haidt estimated that liberals made up 80 percent of the 1,000 psychologists in the ballroom. When he asked for centrists and libertarians, he spotted fewer than three dozen hands. And then, when he asked for conservatives, he counted a grand total of three.
This is a statistically impossible lack of diversity, Dr. Haidt concluded, noting polls showing that 40 percent of Americans are conservative and 20 percent are liberal. In his speech and in an interview, Dr. Haidt argued that social psychologists are a tribal-moral community united by sacred values that hinder research and damage their credibility and blind them to the hostile climate theyve created for non-liberals.
Anywhere in the world that social psychologists see women or minorities underrepresented by a factor of two or three, our minds jump to discrimination as the explanation, said Dr. Haidt, who called himself a longtime liberal turned centrist. But when we find out that conservatives are underrepresented among us by a factor of more than 100, suddenly everyone finds it quite easy to generate alternate explanations.
Dr. Haidt (pronounced height) told the audience that he had been corresponding with a couple of non-liberal graduate students in social psychology whose experiences reminded him of closeted gay students in the 1980s. He quoted anonymously from their e-mails describing how they hid their feelings when colleagues made political small talk and jokes predicated on the assumption that everyone was a liberal.
I consider myself very middle-of-the-road politically: a social liberal but fiscal conservative. Nonetheless, I avoid the topic of politics around work, one student wrote. Given what Ive read of the literature, I am certain any research I conducted in political psychology would provide contrary findings and, therefore, go unpublished. Although I think I could make a substantial contribution to the knowledge base, and would be excited to do so, I will not.
<<<SNIP>>> If a group circles around sacred values, they will evolve into a tribal-moral community, he said. Theyll embrace science whenever it supports their sacred values, but theyll ditch it or distort it as soon as it threatens a sacred value. Its easy for social scientists to observe this process in other communities, like the fundamentalist Christians who embrace intelligent design while rejecting Darwinism. But academics can be selective, too, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan found in 1965 when he warned about the rise of unmarried parenthood and welfare dependency among blacks violating the taboo against criticizing victims of racism.
Moynihan was shunned by many of his colleagues at Harvard as racist, Dr. Haidt said. Open-minded inquiry into the problems of the black family was shut down for decades, precisely the decades in which it was most urgently needed. Only in the last few years have liberal sociologists begun to acknowledge that Moynihan was right all along.
END EXCERPT
February 7, 2011 By JOHN TIERNEY The NY Times EXCERPT: (Emphasis added)
SAN ANTONIO Some of the worlds pre-eminent experts on bias discovered an unexpected form of it at their annual meeting.
Discrimination is always high on the agenda at the Society for Personality and Social Psychologys conference, where psychologists discuss their research on racial prejudice, homophobia, sexism, stereotype threat and unconscious bias against minorities. But the most talked-about speech at this years meeting, which ended Jan. 30, involved a new outgroup.
It was identified by Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia who studies the intuitive foundations of morality and ideology. He polled his audience at the San Antonio Convention Center, starting by asking how many considered themselves politically liberal. A sea of hands appeared, and Dr. Haidt estimated that liberals made up 80 percent of the 1,000 psychologists in the ballroom. When he asked for centrists and libertarians, he spotted fewer than three dozen hands. And then, when he asked for conservatives, he counted a grand total of three.
This is a statistically impossible lack of diversity, Dr. Haidt concluded, noting polls showing that 40 percent of Americans are conservative and 20 percent are liberal. In his speech and in an interview, Dr. Haidt argued that social psychologists are a tribal-moral community united by sacred values that hinder research and damage their credibility and blind them to the hostile climate theyve created for non-liberals.
Anywhere in the world that social psychologists see women or minorities underrepresented by a factor of two or three, our minds jump to discrimination as the explanation, said Dr. Haidt, who called himself a longtime liberal turned centrist. But when we find out that conservatives are underrepresented among us by a factor of more than 100, suddenly everyone finds it quite easy to generate alternate explanations.
Dr. Haidt (pronounced height) told the audience that he had been corresponding with a couple of non-liberal graduate students in social psychology whose experiences reminded him of closeted gay students in the 1980s. He quoted anonymously from their e-mails describing how they hid their feelings when colleagues made political small talk and jokes predicated on the assumption that everyone was a liberal.
I consider myself very middle-of-the-road politically: a social liberal but fiscal conservative. Nonetheless, I avoid the topic of politics around work, one student wrote. Given what Ive read of the literature, I am certain any research I conducted in political psychology would provide contrary findings and, therefore, go unpublished. Although I think I could make a substantial contribution to the knowledge base, and would be excited to do so, I will not.
<<<SNIP>>> If a group circles around sacred values, they will evolve into a tribal-moral community, he said. Theyll embrace science whenever it supports their sacred values, but theyll ditch it or distort it as soon as it threatens a sacred value. Its easy for social scientists to observe this process in other communities, like the fundamentalist Christians who embrace intelligent design while rejecting Darwinism. But academics can be selective, too, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan found in 1965 when he warned about the rise of unmarried parenthood and welfare dependency among blacks violating the taboo against criticizing victims of racism.
Moynihan was shunned by many of his colleagues at Harvard as racist, Dr. Haidt said. Open-minded inquiry into the problems of the black family was shut down for decades, precisely the decades in which it was most urgently needed. Only in the last few years have liberal sociologists begun to acknowledge that Moynihan was right all along.
END EXCERPT
