As The New York Times notes, “Some of the world’s pre-eminent experts on bias discovered an unexpected form of it at their annual meeting” when University of Virginia social psychologist Jonathan Haidt polled the attendees at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology’s conference:
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 they’ve 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.”
(Via: Outside the Beltway)
February 8th, 2011 | 11:18 am
[...] First Thoughts Joe Carter – Experts on Bias Exhibit a “Statistically Impossible Lack of Dive… [...]
February 8th, 2011 | 2:49 pm
To quote Claude Rains in Casablanca, “I’m shocked…shocked!” :)
February 8th, 2011 | 4:04 pm
I’m amused by the way the web address for that article turned out, at least on my browser:
“Social Scientists Detect Liberal Bias Within – NYTimes.com.”
Take out the dash, and you have another story for social scientists to talk about!
February 8th, 2011 | 5:00 pm
the comments on the story are pretty pathetic
February 8th, 2011 | 5:40 pm
There is an easy explanation. How many conservatives, either political or cultural or both, would gravitate toward a field called “social psychology”?
February 8th, 2011 | 6:29 pm
Craig Payne,
What are you getting at? I’m not sure if you’re trying to insult conservatives or social psychology (or neither?).
February 8th, 2011 | 9:06 pm
Craig, you should read the article.
In particular two points:
“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…”
and
“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,…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.”
This man has been studying conservatives for awhile. Sometimes reading what he writes has the feel of a 19th century anthropologist writing about “the natives”. But he tries not to sound like that, and every time I see another article from him, he sounds less like that.
Maybe liberals could learn something from him. But they’d have to be willing to value open-mindedness more than their “tribal-moral community”. Of course it is easier subjecting others to fancy-jargon criticism than it is to be on the receiving end, so maybe it’s just too new an experience to have to take it instead of dishing it out….
February 8th, 2011 | 10:35 pm
Dear Stephen: I guess it was an insult, although I didn’t mean it harshly. Anyway, it was aimed at social psychology. The discipline of psychology itself has a leftish reputation; “social” psychology just seems more so.
February 9th, 2011 | 9:38 am
Dr. Haidt can kiss his career goodbye.
February 9th, 2011 | 11:56 am
Gary Keith Chesterton,
You know, you could read the article and find out how favorable reactions to Dr. Haidt’s address have been. But that wouldn’t make for a snarky attack on people who you vaguely mistrust, would it?
February 9th, 2011 | 3:56 pm
Well actually sociologists wouldn’t jump to the conclusion that discrimination in the active sense explains all. ‘Tribal groups’ form even without active discrimination. And what’s interesting is that all the claims of biased almost always use results oriented stats as their support. We don’t have cases of systemic bias against conservatives (although I’m sure cases can be cited and do exist), we have results orientated bias.
But this can happen for reasons other than blatent discrimination. For instance, sociology as a science views things like tradition, mythology, culture as highly contingent upon place and circumstances of the people experiencing them. Conservatives tend to view these things as sacred, or borderline sacred. It shouldn’t be surprising then that the field is one that many conservatives will not want to get too far into. This then sets off a cycle, having more liberals the theories developed veer more liberal making the whole field even less attractive to conservatives. But this is not based on any discrimination in the active sense.
So what’s the solution? well affirmative action. sociology needs a right wing POV. In fact, I suspect sociologists crave criticism from a conservative sociologists. Hence Charles Murry made millions with his Bell Curve, a non-trivial amount no doubt from liberals who wanted to argue with it. Want to publish a leftist sociology tract that asserts institutional racism is still a major problem? You’ll be lucky if a small academic press gives you a 1,000 book run. But conservatives for the most part probably don’t want to be sociologists hence you gotta make it more enticing for conservatives to go to grad. school in sociology. But then what becomes of the right wing criticism of affirmative action?
February 9th, 2011 | 6:18 pm
There is an easy explanation. How many conservatives, either political or cultural or both, would gravitate toward a field called “social psychology”?
My father did graduate work in social psychology, up to the point of producing an outline for a dissertation. He was a Republican his entire adult life.
February 9th, 2011 | 11:16 pm
Stephen,
No, it wouldn’t. :^)
February 10th, 2011 | 6:03 am
Conservatives do not need “affirmative action”. (Was it a conservative or a liberal that came up with the “10% conservative” solution?)
All conservatives need is for people to stop justifying (and letting other people get away with justifying) double standards, endless exceptions to rules that ought to apply equally to everyone.
The key to making that happen is to puncture the sophistry and reveal it for what it is, not generate more of it.
February 10th, 2011 | 8:24 am
“My father did graduate work in social psychology, up to the point of producing an outline for a dissertation. He was a Republican his entire adult life.”
I’m sure he did admirable work. However, mightn’t he be the exception to the rule?
I mean, so far the answer to my question is, “One.”
February 10th, 2011 | 10:44 am
Blake,
All conservatives need is for people to stop justifying (and letting other people get away with justifying) double standards, endless exceptions to rules that ought to apply equally to everyone.
I don’t think conservatives need affirmative action. Sociology does to avoid group think. While I’m sure there are specific cases of actual discrimination that should be addressed, the lack of conservatives in sociology is not due to discrimination but the habit of humans to clump together. This being the case, conservatives are no more entitled to claim victimization just because few of them are in sociology as whites can’t seriously claim they are victims of discrimination because the NBA has more black and fewer white players than their representation in the larger population.
February 10th, 2011 | 11:38 am
Boonton, it is simply not true that the lack of conservatives in sociology is not due to discrimination.
That is a comforting “alternate explanation” that social scientists use to justify and deny.
There is ample evidence that, in fact, there are conservatives who want to go into the social sciences, and are finding their access blocked.
February 10th, 2011 | 12:59 pm
In that case specific instances of discrimination should be documented and addressed. Considering how happy lawyers are to make money, no doubt they’d be delighted to sue for wrongful termination, job discrimination etc.
But even if all overt discrimination is eliminated, you will still find that the distribution will be ‘lumpy’. Which is why liberals are justified in getting annoyed by pieces like this. People who haven’t discriminated against anyone are accused of being ‘closed’. But are they really? You can’t ignore that network effects and ‘lock in’ are real even in an environment where no one wants to be discriminatory.
February 10th, 2011 | 1:01 pm
I’m sure he did admirable work. However, mightn’t he be the exception to the rule?
You ask, I tell, Craig. Personally, I have no clue why you think it incredible that someone such as my father would be attracted to the subject of social psychology. There are pseudo-disicplines like ‘peace studies’ or ‘women’s studies’ which would certainly repel people who do not begin with certain premises, but these had not yet infected academic life during his years as a student and employee in higher education. A programme in social research, to the extent it can be referred to as a ‘social science’ has to be able to accommodate a variety of understandings of what is normative. If it cannot, either by its nature or because the make up of its practitioners no longer permits it, the trustees of institutions have a responsibility to save the tuition-payers a few bucks and shut the department down.
February 10th, 2011 | 1:22 pm
There are pseudo-disicplines like ‘peace studies’ or ‘women’s studies’ which would certainly repel people who do not begin with certain premises…
Such as that women exist? Conservative POV have nothing to say about women in an academic manner? More importantly conservatives can’t even say anything about women in the future even if they haven’t done so to date? Seems like a bold statement of conservative intellectual limitation….
February 10th, 2011 | 5:14 pm
It is not a “conservative intellectual limitation.” It is an inherent limitation in the field itself. Conservatives tend to begin with the premise that studying what unites humans, what we have in common, is more interesting and worthwhile than studying the divisions as if they were the whole story. (Of which type of study departments such as “women’s studies” are guilty.)
“You can’t discuss the story of black women in America because you’re white and a male.” That is the inherently limiting attitude. It’s only helpful for those who make a living in one of these little boxes of academia.
“Social psychology” may not be one of these boxes–in which case, Art Deco, I apologize if I have offended.
February 11th, 2011 | 7:06 am
How about majoring then in ancient history, specifically Greek-Roman history? That would seem to be very non-conservative then the minority of humans are directly descended from Greece or Rome, but last time I checked the rate at which humans are descended from women is 100%.
I don’t think only women can do women’s studies nor am I aware of any college that would restrict the major to only women.
February 11th, 2011 | 9:00 am
There are pseudo-disicplines like ‘peace studies’ or ‘women’s studies’ which would certainly repel people who do not begin with certain premises…
Such as that women exist? Conservative POV have nothing to say about women in an academic manner?
Women’s studies is based on the assumption that women are oppressed.
This assumption requires a starting value: that androgyny is ideal, and that gendered roles are inherently bad.
The assumption is sustained by relentlessly comparing various types of evidence against this ideal.
To give a concrete example: the feminist essay “Carnal Abominations: The Female Body as Grotesque” by Margaret Miles, she uses selective comparison against an ideal.
When working with non-gendered material, she makes it gendered by simply taking it out of context. Example: she uses evidence from the early middle ages to demonstrate how the human body was viewed by Christianity with fear and disgust. She uses sleight of hand to argue that “bodies” includes female bodies, and then goes on from there to act as if females are singled out. It is technically true, as female bodies are included, but spiritually dishonest, since she’s using this as an excuse to avoid dealing with the question of how early middle ages Christians viewed male bodies. Her comparison relies on comparing early Church attitudes toward female bodies with today’s attitudes toward female bodies. Her comparison does not hold up if it turns out the early medieval Church had the same attitude of disgust and/or fear toward flesh in general.
Then, when she is working with material that is specifically gendered, again, she compares it exclusively with today’s context, which is a lie by omission, because she excludes relevant data, presenting a misleading sense of “all things equal”.
Social scientists ought to know that you have to hold other variables steady to make a valid comparison, so it does in fact suggest a lack of credibility when “feminist studies” arguments rely on comparing things that are not like.
So, before you can draw any big conclusions about, for instance, the early church viewing prostitutes as unclean and to be avoided on cleanliness grounds (which by the way also involves subjective values, as today there are still people who believe prostitutes are unclean and should be avoided for that reason as well as any others), you have to be honest about whether the changed attitudes are solely because of growing “enlightenment” regarding the personhood of women, vs. whether changed attitudes reflect changed awareness of things like the true cause of disease, changes in cultural anxieties, the causes of superstitions, etc.
So yeah, this is one reason conservatives don’t go into women’s studies. They would immediately want to ask questions about the reasons behind the changing attittudes toward bodily fluids, blood, and pregnancy – and those questions would violate the sacred taboo.
Because feminist studies is propped up on the idea that it’s somehow sexist and evil to compare a woman’s condition to that of her husband of equal social status. Feminist studies relies on selective comparison – comparing the way females have lived against the way they ought to have lived, rather than against how males of a similar status and time frame actually lived.
February 11th, 2011 | 10:02 am
Women’s studies is based on the assumption that women are oppressed
Or is that a dominant paradign in a field that few conservatives choose to engage with. It seems that there’s no reason a conservative influenced theory couldn’t be developed and presented.
This assumption requires a starting value: that androgyny is ideal, and that gendered roles are inherently bad.
By androngyny I take it you mean the assumption that there is no real difference between male and female except anatomical ones. This is interesting because I recall sometime around the early 90′s conservatives making a big deal about so-called ‘difference feminism’ which I suppose was analgous to the difference in views between Malcome X and MKL Jr. in regards to race. Their criticism was that by viewing women as different, they weren’t arguing for simple equal protection (i.e. equal pay for equal work) but special accomodations and rights….. Kind of interesting since that sounds like a right wing criticism of some feminists for *failing* to abide by an androngyny assumption.
In fact rejecting androngyny, as you advocate, makes the case for women’s studies by itself. If, say, ancient Greece was no different than anything else then what merit is there in having it as its own field of studies. That it is is premised upon the assumption that there are unique things to learn by studying ancient Greece that you won’t get by, say, studying the history of comic books in America. If you reject androngyny then you’re saying women are different from men, this difference is non-trivial and this different is not simply a by product of history, culture, time or place (if it was then you could just incorporate it in your study, of, say history). There’s no inherent reason then that conservatives couldn’t make academic contributions to this field.
Your rejection basically proves my point. You say no conservatives want to go into women’s studies because the field itself just isn’t for them. Note that you did not claim that promising conservatives have been shut out of the field because of discrimination.
Basically women’s studies is liberal because conservatives don’t go there, that makes it more liberal which reinforces it’s attraction to liberals and its repulsion to conservatives. But as your assertions alone show, there’s no real foundational reason it would have to be a liberal field. You just imagine there is because you would feel pretty lonely in a women’s studies dept.
February 11th, 2011 | 10:08 am
Correct me if I’m mistaken but I think an example of a field with real ‘foundational reasons’ to be rejected by some would be atheism and theology. If a person seriously doesn’t believe God exists then what merit could they derive devoting themselves to a field whose assumption is that he does? He may find Biblical studies interesting or the history of religious doctrines interesting but theology would seem to me to be pointless for him.
February 12th, 2011 | 4:30 am
Boonton: It is liberals who hold androgyny as an ideal, not conservatives.
By androgyny, I mean a set of subjective values – that liberals ascribe to and conservatives do not – that say that males and females should not have to accept differences.
Since the obvious problem with this is that it is biology, not humankind, that has chosen to make life unfair, this requires that humankind be called upon to promote policies that compensate women for having gotten what they think of as a bum deal biologically speaking.
To put it bluntly, if feminists are to be taken by their writings, they are self-loathing and the movement itself is fueled by envy and covetousness: they wish they were men.
They hate that their bodies require that they must be dependent on men (or else skip reproduction); they are angry because men don’t have to make that choice. They hold a deep repugnance for traditional feminine roles and tasks. They want to be men, and they want society to find a way to reconcile the fact that someone must actually do the tasks that traditionally were assigned to women. In short, they want equality of outcome, and don’t care if that means equality of opportunity, or unjust redistribution of resources.
The problem, of course, isn’t with these beliefs themselves, but with the fact that they are defended and surrounded by taboos.
Because one cannot challenge or question the core assumptions at the root of these beliefs, it is fair to say they are not rational, logical, reasonable, or justifiable. They’re emotional, petty, and fall into the category of “emotional baggage”.
A conservative entering such an environment faces considerably greater obstacles than most cases recognized as “discrimination”.
Which goes right back to the original speaker’s point: that we are singling out conservatives for different treatment when it comes to speaking about what discrimination is, whether it matters, and what should be done about it. There are double standards, different rules applied to different groups of people.
If conservatives were ever welcomed, it would shake the field up – but that is precisely why they are not: because academics have consistently prioritized their “sacred values” over truth, open-mindedness, and academic freedom.
February 13th, 2011 | 9:27 am
Blake
By androgyny, I mean a set of subjective values – that liberals ascribe to and conservatives do not – that say that males and females should not have to accept differences.
The word ‘should’ is normative, not descriptive. By assuming there are non-trivial differences between men and women, you walk into the case for women’s studies. Again if there are real differences, then that makes them worthy of study both as a group and individually. Look, you wouldn’t say there’s no real difference between Semitic languages (Arabic, Hebrew, etc.) and Romance ones (French, Italian, Latin etc.). By saying so this makes the case for both macro study (linguistics) and micro study (Romance studies, Semitic lanugage studies etc.).
Now I disagree that liberals necessarily ascribe to androgyny. In reality I think the record is rather mixed with conservatives sometimes arguing for it (such as the arguments against ‘difference feminists’) and sometimes against it (as you do). But that’s not really the point of this argument. The point is your very statements alone justify Women’s Studies and Gender Studies. The only reason you oppose it is social. Since it’s currently a ‘liberals club’ you feel there’s nothing for Conservatives to do other than oppose it. This dynamic demonstrates why the professor is right to bemoan the lack of conservatives in sociology AND sociologists are right to be annoyed at the idea that they are discriminating against conservatives.
To put it bluntly, if feminists are to be taken by their writings, they are self-loathing and the movement itself is fueled by envy and covetousness: they wish they were men.
Irrelevant. The field of psychology was more or less founded by Freud and Jung, yet today true followers are about as rare as finding monarchists in the political science field. Since Freud, psychology has seen a host of thinkers come to dominante the field, get overturned, then even get resurrected (see, for example, BF Skinner). Saying conservatives can’t do women’s studies because many of the fields founders are liberals is as silly as saying liberals can’t do poly sci since many of its fields founders were skeptics of democracy and apologists for monarchy.
Anyway, don’t conservatives have their own counternarrative where pre-20th Century Feminists are read as ‘good’ ‘Equality Feminists’ such as Susan B Anthony.
If conservatives were ever welcomed, it would shake the field up – but that is precisely why they are not: because academics have consistently prioritized their “sacred values” over truth, open-mindedness, and academic freedom.
This is kind of like saying whites should be ‘welcomed’ into the NBA. If someone were to seriously propose that, what would black players make of it? Don’t block the white guy when he gets the ball? Pass to white teammates more often??? You don’t get ‘welcomed’ into an academic field. Academic fields are touch and very competitive all made up of people who to us look the same (boring dudes and dudettes who read and write dense text) but to themselves are engaged in an epic king of the mountain fight to dominate the field. Asking for ‘welcome’ is just more excuse making on your part. In fact, conservatives already have an advantage in that if they choose to go into the field they could attack ‘the mountain’ from a side that is less crowded. This often happens in many fields. Charles Murray is a good example IMO. He’s probably pulled in at least a million from the Bell Curve, I gurantee you there are liberal sociologists who do more intelligent work who will never see that. Why? Because they join dozens, hundreds of others.
At the end of the day your ‘discrimination’ boils down to it’s human nature to be the only person in a room with one opinion while everyone else has another. I fully agree that is often uncomfortable and it’s perfectly natural to seek rooms with more balance or where your view donominates. But this has nothing to do with the people in the room doing anything wrong to you, nor does it have anything to do with the ‘fundamental aspects’ of the room which would be roughly analgous to what you seem to be claiming.
Now don’t get me wrong, when 99% of people in a room think one way, the odds that a few will act unjustly towards the person who disagrees goes up. Likewise there is a small group of people who enjoy being the 1%, the guy whose famous for disagreeing with everyone (and the two dynamics are probably related…the guy motivated to be the 1% is often also motivated to be annoying and ‘in your face’ which probably makes incidents more likely….David Horowitz is probably a good example of that, a guy who started being the annoying radical leftist and when that club got a bit too popular jumped ship to become the annoying radical rightist). This dynamic works for both the 99% who feel comfortable and the 1% who get the spotlight but doesn’t work out so well for the field itself which needs not drama queen 1%ers but a boring and dull 20-30%. Hence I welcome you conservatives to the affirmative action club. Pick up your tweed jackets form the secretary.
February 14th, 2011 | 6:08 am
Boonton, I didn’t say there was or wasn’t a case for “women’s studies”.
I just said that the fact that the field is ruled by sacred taboos, rather than being open to intellectual and academic freedom, creates a situation where conservatives are openly discriminated against.
I don’t even think this is bad for conservatives, per se. It is like economic protectionism: it hurts the one being protected far more than it hurts the competition.
The people who take “women’s studies” seriously do not even realize that they have become a joke. They do not even see that their arguments are just laughably, obviously flawed. The rest of the world moves on – and grows intellectually, and debates the real substance of the arguments – while a bunch of narcissists living in the fabled ivory tower flatter each other, and justify the fact that they have lost all prestige and all influence by simply saying reassuring things about how stupid “those people out there” are.
Meanwhile, the real question is, now that everyone knows that these ivory-tower narcissists have nothing to offer our young people educationally, what should be done about the situation?
February 14th, 2011 | 3:05 pm
Blake
I just said that the fact that the field is ruled by sacred taboos, rather than being open to intellectual and academic freedom, creates a situation where conservatives are openly discriminated against.
Name me a field that is rule by happy ‘open intellectual and academic freedom’? What you’re describing is a theory that’s true in the big scope of things but not true ‘on the ground’. Take Democracy, on the larger scale we are ruled by elections and ‘the will of the voters’. On the ground, though, political parties perceive themselves in endless trench warfare jockeying back and forth for advantage.
Second, there’s no reason to think ‘sacred taboos’ can’t be overturned in women’s studies anymore than they can in any other field. When I was little I recall a major theme of feminists (at least as presented by the Phil Donahue show) was the pornography was exploting women…with much preoccupation given to questioning things like Playboy, Miss America, Swimsuit issues etc. This theme was developed to the extreme (“all sex is rape”) but was then challenged by a series of ‘sex positive’ feminists. There’s no reason to think that gender studies is any different than any other field that’s seen its so-called taboos challenged, overturned and even reversed. In fact, in a ‘king of the mountain’ model, this is a very viable tactic for winning in the competition. This is basically what happened in psychology. You begin with Freud’s theories about the unconscious mind. BF Skinner comes along attacking from the totally opposite front….the ‘mind’ can’t be observed or measured so you might as well assume it doesn’t even exist…all that matters is behavior that can be observed and that’s what psychology should study in a scientific manner. Then his orthodoxy itself was challenged. Such a strategy, though, is not easy to pull off. It requires a serious and sustained attack with great motivation. Sitting around carping about not being ‘welcomed’ smacks of non-motivation.
Which brings us to the problem, ‘open discrimination’ has not been demonstrated except for some isolated cases nor is it a valid assumption just based on statistics. Several times in discussing this topic the discrimination that gets brought up is ‘soft discrimination’. The conservative who sits in a class and finds everyone disagrees with him, for example. This can explain how a field goes from 70% liberal to 99%…but it’s not ‘open discrimination’.
The people who take “women’s studies” seriously do not even realize that they have become a joke. They do not even see that their arguments are just laughably, obviously flawed. The rest of the world moves on – and grows intellectually, and debates the real substance of the arguments – while a bunch of narcissists living in the fabled ivory tower flatter each other, and justify the fact that they have lost all prestige and all influence by simply saying reassuring things about how stupid “those people out there” are.
curiously I suspect if a conservative was described by the students and professor in a woman’s study course as a joke, a bigot, a man whose only ideas were based on his own self interest and who couldn’t even imagine for a moment the impact his behaviors and policies has on anyone who isn’t just like him in gender, race or class you’d probably cite that as ‘open discrimination’. But sitting around calling those who you disagree with jokes, narcissists etc. is just ‘rigerous debate’ I suppose.
This is the evidence that you’re not dealing with ‘open discrimination’ but simply ‘open reinforcing disinterest’. Conservatives have no interest in developing theories that relate to women and gender as much as they are interested in mocking those that do. As a result those that do have no interest or use for conservatives. That gets translated by conservatives as victimiation (the women’s studies groups are discriminating against non-existent conservatives who are trying to enter the field because they won’t ‘issue a nicely worded invitation’). Likewise the women’s study groups have no reason to be interested in conservative ideas which seem to be nothing more than sitting around bashing the whole field.
This is not, though, an argument that conservatives must engage in women’s studies. Perhaps they simply find it easier to mock it from afar with talk radio rhetoric rather than seriously engage in it. Likewise there’s no rule that theories about gender have to be developed inside ‘womens studies’ departments. Philosophy would seem to be a good candidate as well….and in the long view of things it wasn’t that long ago that basically all university subjects were just sub-branches of philosophy anyway. But if that’s the case then there basically isn’t a problem. A field dominated by one mindset cannot grow beyond a niche, if those in the field are ok with that then so be it. Likewise those outside the field shouldn’t complain about hypothetical bias or discrimination. No one is stopping them from entering the field and developing their theories within it. If they’d rather operate elsewhere because they lack the motivation to fight for a rather small hill then that’s not the hill’s problem but theirs….or not.
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