I heard this interview yesterday on NPR - Neal Conan spoke with psychologist Jonathan Haidt on political bias in the social sciences. The conversation was sparked by a recent article in the New York Times by John Tierney that reported on a talk Haidt had given at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.
Haidt's use of the term "tribal" to describe the opposing worldviews is very accurate - it's an us-versus-them mentality that is very tribal in its origins. You can find more responses to the talk at Haidt's page.
Here is the New York Times article - below this is the NPR interview with Haidt.
Social Scientist Sees Bias Within
By JOHN TIERNEY
Published: February 7, 2011
SAN ANTONIO — Some of the world’s 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 Psychology’s 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 year’s 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 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.”
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 I’ve 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.”
The politics of the professoriate has been studied by the economists Christopher Cardiff and Daniel Klein and the sociologists Neil Gross and Solon Simmons. They’ve independently found that Democrats typically outnumber Republicans at elite universities by at least six to one among the general faculty, and by higher ratios in the humanities and social sciences. In a 2007 study of both elite and non-elite universities, Dr. Gross and Dr. Simmons reported that nearly 80 percent of psychology professors are Democrats, outnumbering Republicans by nearly 12 to 1.
The fields of psychology, sociology and anthropology have long attracted liberals, but they became more exclusive after the 1960s, according to Dr. Haidt. “The fight for civil rights and against racism became the sacred cause unifying the left throughout American society, and within the academy,” he said, arguing that this shared morality both “binds and blinds.”
“If a group circles around sacred values, they will evolve into a tribal-moral community,” he said. “They’ll embrace science whenever it supports their sacred values, but they’ll ditch it or distort it as soon as it threatens a sacred value.” It’s 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.”
Similarly, Larry Summers, then president of Harvard, was ostracized in 2005 for wondering publicly whether the preponderance of male professors in some top math and science departments might be due partly to the larger variance in I.Q. scores among men (meaning there are more men at the very high and very low ends). “This was not a permissible hypothesis,” Dr. Haidt said. “It blamed the victims rather than the powerful. The outrage ultimately led to his resignation. We psychologists should have been outraged by the outrage. We should have defended his right to think freely.”
Instead, the taboo against discussing sex differences was reinforced, so universities and the National Science Foundation went on spending tens of millions of dollars on research and programs based on the assumption that female scientists faced discrimination and various forms of unconscious bias. But that assumption has been repeatedly contradicted, most recently in a study published Monday in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by two Cornell psychologists, Stephen J. Ceci and Wendy M. Williams. After reviewing two decades of research, they report that a woman in academic science typically fares as well as, if not better than, a comparable man when it comes to being interviewed, hired, promoted, financed and published.
“Thus,” they conclude, “the ongoing focus on sex discrimination in reviewing, interviewing and hiring represents costly, misplaced effort. Society is engaged in the present in solving problems of the past.” Instead of presuming discrimination in science or expecting the sexes to show equal interest in every discipline, the Cornell researchers say, universities should make it easier for women in any field to combine scholarship with family responsibilities.
Can social scientists open up to outsiders’ ideas? Dr. Haidt was optimistic enough to title his speech “The Bright Future of Post-Partisan Social Psychology,” urging his colleagues to focus on shared science rather than shared moral values. To overcome taboos, he advised them to subscribe to National Review and to read Thomas Sowell’s “A Conflict of Visions.”
For a tribal-moral community, the social psychologists in Dr. Haidt’s audience seemed refreshingly receptive to his argument. Some said he overstated how liberal the field is, but many agreed it should welcome more ideological diversity. A few even endorsed his call for a new affirmative-action goal: a membership that’s 10 percent conservative by 2020. The society’s executive committee didn’t endorse Dr. Haidt’s numerical goal, but it did vote to put a statement on the group’s home page welcoming psychologists with “diverse perspectives.” It also made a change on the “Diversity Initiatives” page — a two-letter correction of what it called a grammatical glitch, although others might see it as more of a Freudian slip.
In the old version, the society announced that special funds to pay for travel to the annual meeting were available to students belonging to “underrepresented groups (i.e., ethnic or racial minorities, first-generation college students, individuals with a physical disability, and/or lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgendered students).”
As Dr. Haidt noted in his speech, the “i.e.” implied that this was the exclusive, sacred list of “underrepresented groups.” The society took his suggestion to substitute “e.g.” — a change that leaves it open to other groups, too. Maybe, someday, even to conservatives.
OK, then, this article stirred up a lot of responses - more than 500 comments, many of them less than open-minded. In fact, the comments tend to reflect the degree of polarization that exists between liberal and conservative perspectives in this country.
So NPR decided to run an interview with Haidt to discuss the issue.
Each year, psychologists gather to discuss research on racial intolerance, sexism, and other forms of bias. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt researches bias, and discovered an unexpected form of prejudice among his own colleagues: political bias.
***
NEAL CONAN, host:
The buzz from the most recent annual conference on the Society of Personality and Social Psychology was a paper about bias among social psychologists.
Jonathan Haidt began with an informal audience poll of the 1,000 social scientists in attendance. He asked, how many considered themselves politically liberal? About 80 percent raised their hands. He then asked for centrists or libertarians; fewer than a dozen hands went up. When he asked for self-identified conservatives, only three hands went up. That, he told his audience, is a statistically impossible lack of diversity. In other words, it's the product of institutional ideological bias.
So let's hear from social psychologists. Is Haidt right? And what difference does it make? 800-989-8255. Email us: talk@npr.org. You can also join the conversation on our website. It's at npr.org. Click on TALK OF THE NATION.
Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist at the University of Virginia, with us from a studio on the campus there. Nice to have you with us today.
Professor JONATHAN HAIDT (University of Virginia): Nice to be here, Neal.
CONAN: And the issue here is not that conservatives are necessarily underrepresented in social science, not that there is an issue of discrimination, but that non-liberals are actually disappearing and conforming to the majority view.
Prof. HAIDT: That's right. That was really the thing that was concerning me, was not that they're underrepresented. A lot of the critics in the bloggers have said, oh, there's lots of reasons why conservatives will be underrepresented in academe. You know, they're low intelligence, things like that, they say.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Prof. HAIDT: But, you know, the thing that was bothering me wasn't that they're underrepresented. It's that they're basically absent. And when you have - we have a whole community of scientists who share a position, then the system breaks down.
CONAN: And the system breaks down. What do you mean by that?
Prof. HAIDT: Well, I can - I guess I can give you about 20 percent of the psychology of reasoning with two words - that is, confirmation bias. It refers to the fact that we humans are extraordinarily good at finding justifications for whatever conclusion we want to reach. We can spot a supporting justification at 200 meters hiding in a tree. But if it's dangling in front of our face and it goes against our position, we can't see it. And so science works not because we scientists are so smart or so fair or so rational. Science works because it's an institution that puts us all together where we're really, really good at knocking down each other's reasons. And when anybody is doing research on a politically sensitive topic and there is nobody on the other side to raise an objection, well, the science suffers.
CONAN: Nobody challenges the thought and therefore a thesis, a theory that may be invalid goes unchallenged.
Prof. HAIDT: Exactly.
CONAN: And I wonder, what was the reaction in the room when you presented this idea?
Prof. HAIDT: Overwhelmingly positive. I'm actually really proud of my field. It's not - this is not a story about, you know, academics gone wild and, you know, partisan activists and things like that. The overwhelming response was, yeah, you know, I kind of thought that all along. I'm glad somebody finally said it. There was very little defensiveness.
In fact, I actually urged that we change our diversity policy and our affirmative action policy to stop specifying the official list of groups and say what we really are after here is people bring diverse perspectives. And the next day they changed that policy on the Web.
CONAN: So it had an immediate effect?
Prof. HAIDT: A small one, and people are talking about it. So we'll see if anything happens.
CONAN: I wonder, were there any objections though?
Prof. HAIDT: None voiced to me. But, of course, you know, I'm social psychologist. I understand that we don't exactly speak our minds in social situations. So I always, you know, ask my students and everybody else, what have you heard behind the scenes? And I have heard from a few people who are upset. But I'm really surprised at how, you know, how little I've been attacked.
CONAN: Conformity, does that suggests that people who might have conservative views after they joined the profession changed them, or does it suggests that people of liberal bent self-select?
Prof. HAIDT: It's self-selection mostly. And the real problem, I think, is that there is almost enough diversity out there in terms of people who are interested in the field, and there are some graduate students. And actually, one of the important points, it's not - this isn't even so much about conservatives. The people who are writing to me now are mostly not even conservative. They're people who say, I'm a centrist or I'm a liberal Christian. They're just people who aren't secular liberals. And they feel excluded. They feel unwelcome. And so they either keep quiet or they back out.
CONAN: And this is a phenomenon that may vary ideology to ideology, depending on the circumstances of the particular field.
Prof. HAIDT: Exactly. I mean, the point of my talk was that we form tribal moral communities. And I wasn't picking on my field in particular. This is just the nature of humankind. We're really, really good at identifying sacred principles and objects and values, and then we circle around them and then we trust each other and we work together.
You know - and that's great if you're the military of the police or, you know, if you're Zappos.com, whatever it is. If you have a job to do, it helps to all share values. But if the job that you are trying to do is to find the truth, then sharing the values is actually counterproductive.
CONAN: It's hard to find a profession - again, you know, that sort of tribal identity is important in almost every profession, but it's hard to find a profession where diversity of views would not be helpful.
Prof. HAIDT: Well, if - I disagree with that. I think if your job is to get people to suppress their self-interest and sacrifice for the group, then diversity is harmful. But if your job is to figure out what's really going on in the outside world, then you absolutely need it. So I would say academics, the, you know, defense intelligence community, the leadership of the military could really use it even if the rank and file might not need it.
CONAN: We're talking with Jonathan Haidt, associate psychologist at the University of Virginia about an article about his research on political bias in the field of social science. The piece ran in the New York Times last week, which got us interested in it.
Read the rest of it at the NPR site.
I find this all very interesting - the program I am in (community counseling) which one might think to be very liberal in its approach, especially with all the emphasis on multiculturalism, is actually quite conservative. We had an honest to god fundamentalist Christian teaching about sexuality in counseling - a very closed-minded woman who at one point listed Catholics and Christians as different religions.
Maybe I would be getting a better education if I were in one of those schools dominated by liberals. Alas, I will never know.
Tags:
"Maybe I would be getting a better education if I were in one of those schools dominated by liberals."
ReplyDeleteWell, it sounds as though Haidt is saying that you're possibly better off attending the school you are and being exposed to and challenged by ideas and mindsets presumably quite different from your own.
As for the social science field being overwhelmingly "liberal," it makes sense to me that people attracted to the social sciences would embrace the "liberal" presupposition that we and our conduct are powerfully shaped by environmental socioeconomic factors and that these individuals would be interested in studying precisely how this works, and that such an outlook and research paradigm would not attract those who embrace the "conservative" view that we are largely self-determining agents who freely choose our own conduct and create our own happiness and unhappiness relatively independently of our socioeconomic environment.