Social psychologists, watch out: you have nothing to lose but your liberalism
For obvious reasons, several people have sent me this link to a NY Times article on the overwhelming presence of liberals in the field of personality and social psychology. Conservatives? This group has barely ever heard of em, except perhaps as subjects to study.
Psychologist Jonathan Haidt has, however, and he addressed the Society for Personality and Social Psychology’s recent convention, confronting members with the fact that their profession is almost completely dominated by liberals to a degree so profound that it is a “statistical impossibility” that it is accidental. He added:
…[S]ocial 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.
Haidt illustrated that atmosphere by quoting letters and emails he’s received from conservative grad students in the field, who see the need to keep themselves closeted in order to have any hopes of advancing in their chosen profession.
To us it all sounds so familiar as to be glaringly obvious. But it’s easy to forget that, although some of this discrimination is conscious and purposeful, many of the rank and file who are safely cocooned in the bosom of that sort of group have no idea what’s going on. To them, if they notice the phenomenon at all, there’s a simple explanation (and one I’ve heard many times about many other fields of endeavor): that liberals are just smarter than conservatives, and also more interested in people and how they work. The possibility of systematic selection, or discrimination, or indoctrination, or self-fulfilling prophecies, is just too difficult to entertain or accept (even, or maybe especially, for social psychologists, who ought to know better) when it’s one’s own group that’s being accused.
I don’t know whether research would back me up, but my theory is that there’s at least a two-part process going on. The first part is that, as in many other professions such as that of therapy and journalism, the subject matter of certain disciplines does draw initially appeal to a disproportionate number of liberals. Many if not most of these fields are artistic endeavors, and/or are concerned primarily with feelings rather than hard facts or practical and technical matters.
Personality and social psychology is a research science, but of the exceedingly soft variety; you might call it the science of the study of feelings, especially as they are expressed in group dynamics (personality psychology does the same for individuals), and as such it would be no surprise it would appeal disproportionately to liberals. Here’s a definition of the group’s areas of interest as explained on the Society’s website:
How do people come to be who they are? How do people think about, influence, and relate to one another?…By exploring forces within the person (such as traits, attitudes, and goals) as well as forces within the situation (such as social norms and incentives), personality and social psychologists seek to unravel the mysteries of individual and social life in areas as wide-ranging as prejudice, romantic attraction, persuasion, friendship, helping, aggression, conformity, and group interaction.
There’s something ironically satisfying about such a group’s inability to understand its own prejudices and demands for conformity. That brings us to part two of the phenomenon, which is that the natural tendencies within the profession that draw more liberals to it in the first place are augmented by a purposeful selection process by which professors and researchers favor certain types of studies which get certain types of results. Therefore, when hiring and giving awards, they tend to choose people who have biases that mesh with the their own.
Each part of the process amplifies the other. The more unitary the group becomes the stronger the selection process becomes, unless there is a giant effort to reverse it. So Haidt has suggested that the group begin a affirmative action hiring policy for conservatives in order to offset it, and a few members (although not the executive committee) have even agreed that it would be a good idea to set a goal that by 2020 the Society include a whopping 10% conservatives.
Wow, talk about tokens! It’s hard to imagine that the affirmative action one out of ten would feel especially welcome around those casual discussions that tend to feature the knee-jerk dissing of conservatives and their political position. I know; I’ve been there too many times.
Haidt has a suggestion for that, too, although it’s a sly one. He gave the assembled psychologists an assignment: “to overcome taboos, he advised them to subscribe to National Review and to read Thomas Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions.”
Watch out, social psychologists! In Haidt, you not only have a conservative on your hands, you’ve got a subversive. By suggesting you actually read some of the best of conservative thought (including a work by a figure you would have thought chimerical, a leading black conservative), Haidt is setting the stage for the possibility not just of acceptance of conservatives in your ranks, but of potential political conversions among the in-crowd.
You may think you are immune to such things (and the majority of you probably are), but some of you may end up with the surprise of your lives. Some day you, too, may wake up and find yourself outside the circle dance.
Here’s a little traveling music:
The last thing a fish would discover is water.
Neo, I so appreciate your comments about liberals in the field of social psychology, of whom I’ve met many. I took a course in social philosophy in my youth from a prof who gently guided us away from blind acceptance of liberal ideas — although I didn’t realize it until some years later! He must have been an exception in his field, although this was in the sixties; maybe things were different then in academia.
My theory is that liberals are prevalent among both psychologists and actors because their professions require the ability to see the world through their subjects’ perceptions and feelings. They place empathy above overall understanding of the situation, both for the individual and for society. Conservatives a more likely to take a wider and a longer view: How does a policy affect the individual, but also how does it affect society in the long term and its impact on the individual? What does it mean for preservation of what we value in society?
I think a liberal is more likely simply to ask: How can we give unfortunates what they want so they won’t be unfortunate any more. He’ll categorize: You’re either a person who cares or one who doesn’t. Then he’ll decide to be one of the “good guys”.
“The principle of self-selection…”
I no more accept a critique of the political opinions of the majority of a social science than I accept this critique of why women don’t tend to major in Physics.
Is there a “liberal” stance on whether psychopaths are formed in the womb, by the society or with a combination of both? Is there a “conservative” stance on this question? What difference does it make , Neo? Let those interested in a particular field dominate that field. If someone else is interested let them in as well. But don’t apply quotas to interests.
The possibility of systematic selection, or discrimination, or indoctrination, or self-fulfilling prophecies, is just too difficult to entertain or accept (even, or maybe especially, for social psychologists, who ought to know better) when it’s one’s own group that’s being accused.
what your saying is that the social engineers believe they are immune to social engineering
that the games they come up with for the skewing of the minds of the common, wont be used on them.
do a search on google for these three terms at once:
STEM women minorities
About 857,000 results (0.21 seconds)
basically all articles on how white men have to leave science so that women and minorities (who now dominate the halls to the point that there are almost no white men), can take up all positions.
some articles more blatant than others.
Nearly 60 percent of respondents said they first became interested in science by age 11. This parallels the findings of a 1998 Bayer Facts survey of American Ph.D. scientists, which included white men. In that survey, six in 10 also reported interest in science by age 11.
In one of her freshman science classes, she recalls, the professor looked at her like she was “bonkers.” “I would ask a question, and he would look at me like it was the dumbest question and then move on,” she says. “Then a white guy down the row asks the same question, and he says, ‘Astute observation.’ It makes you start to really question yourself.”
this is why my son, cant get a job in genetics after graduating with honors.
this is why i couldnt do my schooling as an earlier attempt was to redirect the males who would have been there and ding them any where you can.
which is why they promoted a young woman with 5 years experience over me who has 30 years experience, and senority…
why they are buring a tenured professor till he screams in pain or hurts himself retiring early.
why?
because the social engineers are attempting to create nice numbers on their reports that they can then claim the attainment of an aesthetic and be the ones who invented the control method for humans
(someone should invent the Josef Mengele award for social engineering!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)
all one has to do is look at the group photos of the researchers and their graduate students.
years and years of social science BS based on marxism to prepare for a push today on STEM…
go here..
graduate.asu.edu/index
go ahead… take a look at the page..
count the number of men, and the number of women
on the opening page, two women, one minority
go here and you see they are proud they got their diversity race stuff in order
graduate.asu.edu/grow/diversity/celebrating
so basically feminists dominated social research to prove their marxist view of men and society and then embed that in law.
now that same Nazi argument of disparate impact has us now removing people based on race and religion and gender.
we are disenfranchising people like the nazis did the jews by the same methods. jews couldnt own businesses or run them because of laws. here we have SBA 8A program and other give backs which under reverse discrimination are considered not discriminatino.
ie… if germany did the same means to the end, they would not have written jew into their laws, they would have made laws that were horrible for all small businesses THEN have affirmative action so that the favored do not live by those rules..
they had the brutal direct way which turned the world against them
we have the sneaky mind game way, which the world likes and is helping.
and the same oppressor oppressed game was used, but the targets were men and women, not jews and others.
I don’t know whether research would back me up, but my theory is that there’s at least a two-part process going on.
how about looking up the history rather than imagining it was natural and muse to some social theory absent of methods from history…
Artfldgr: that’s the second part of the two: a purposeful selection process. Some of it is purposely political, as well. I am quite aware of the political background of many of the founders of the field.
My theory is a bit different. Over a fairly long period of time, liberalism has morphed from being a noble ideology that was primarily about compassion into an ideology that is about control.
They’ve outlawed Happy Meals in San Francisco. I’m not sure where the “salt ban” stands, but I understand NYC was considering banning chefs from using salt in restaurants. They’ve decided they don’t want us using incandescent light bulbs, so those are on the way out. As I said, it’s been a long transition, but the once noble ideology of caring about the common fellow has morphed into an ideology where liberal elites want to dictate how the common fellow lives.
I’m not sure what a social psychologist does exactly, but I assume that part of the job description involves influencing how other people think, which obviously influences how they conduct their lives. Wouldn’t a career as a social psychologist be a great profession for a modern day liberal control freak?
” . .the subject matter of certain disciplines does draw initially appeal to a disproportionate number of liberals. Many if not most of these fields are artistic endeavors.”
This may also be, to a great extent, a self-fulfilling prophecy. Thereare great artists who are establishment icons; Rubens and Bernini come to mind.
In the modern world, however, the view of artists as anti-establishment Bohemians is virtually a sine qua non. As it is for sociologists, there is an underlying assumption in the arts that you can’t be a serious practitioner if you are not a liberal; this is why the recent conversion of David Mamet is so paradigm shattering.
15. Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States.
17. Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers’ associations. Put the party line in textbooks.
18. Gain control of all student newspapers.
19. Use student riots to foment public protests against programs or organizations which are under Communist attack.
20. Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, policy making positions.
21. Gain control of key positions in radio, TV, and motion pictures.
25. Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV.
26. Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as “normal, natural, healthy.”
31. Belittle all forms of American culture and discourage the teaching of American history on the ground that it was only a minor part of the “big picture.” Give more emphasis to Russian history since the Communists took over.
32. Support any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture–education, social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics, etc.
36. Infiltrate and gain control of more unions.
37. Infiltrate and gain control of big business.
38. Transfer some of the powers of arrest from the police to social agencies. Treat all behavioral problems as psychiatric disorders which no one but psychiatrists can understand [or treat].
39. Dominate the psychiatric profession and use mental health laws as a means of gaining coercive control over those who oppose Communist goals.
40. Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.
41. Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents.
42. Create the impression that violence and insurrection are legitimate aspects of the American tradition; that students and special-interest groups should rise up and use [“]united force[“] to solve economic, political or social problems.
given that all that was written before the 60s socialist revolution and your noticing the school changing about the time that the above came out.
its from:
Congressional Record–Appendix, pp. A34-A35
January 10, 1963
Current Communist Goals
EXTENSION OF REMARKS OF HON. A. S. HERLONG, JR. OF FLORIDA
IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
Thursday, January 10, 1963
you can muse all you want..
but unless you have the history, you will be helping them by giving them a cover story which will prevent others from reading the history and knowing too.
you never mention dodd. you never mention dewey. naomi goldstein (who pubished her and such)
all one has to do is look at soros and his tides foundation and his books on how he collapsed nation states for fun to see how its done.
this is why we dont know HOW hitler and his friends did what they did and motivated people with social engineering..
the social engineers would never show you that they copied them and used the same plagerized things to do the same thing under other names.
what you and others don’t get is that a nation state, with an army of slaves under communism, has the resources to coordinate thousands of people.
read the planks of the ommunist manifesto, and how can you NOT see it? the same that the liberals dont see their situation. normalization and acclimation.
compare these key points with our state (and note which we have, which we are moving to):
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax. [we have this and have for a long time and now they are using it more than ever as a weapon]
3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance. [they are changing those laws]
5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly. (fed reserve, fdic, etc)
6. Centralization of the means of communication and transportation in the hands of the State. [fcc, and so on – including the new net rules]
7. Extention of factories and instruments of production owned by the State, the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan. [greenish movement, preventing drilling for the nature, delta smelt, nationalizing gm, etc – as far back as Planning Reorganization act of 1949 / ]
10. Free education for all children in government schools. Abolition of children factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc. etc. [topic of two threads here now.. Department of Education, the NEA and Outcome Based “Education” ]
there is more, but the same people also taught everyone NOT to pay attention to such, to marginalize the idea, and not look at the man behind the curtain
I am quite aware of the political background of many of the founders of the field.
how about how many ended up in jail for trading secrets? how many were at the teachers college at columbia?
and that’s the point… its not natural bias, its also manipulated bias from an outside entity we now know what they did!!!!!!!!!!
and THATS whats missing…
self selecting natural bias is one thing, but when the head of the communist party of the USA and the same person is the head of the teachers union (NEA), and they defected and confessed what they did, MAYBE its not just self selection, its people paid by another state to make those selections.
then when you look you can select about 40 other names, and more… then what?
to read the unedited history from the stuff they edit out is a real eye opener, and if you did, you would never assert any natural bias, other than the bias they exploited and nurtured to an end.
Full text of “Hearings regarding Communist espionage in the United States Government. Hearings”
http://www.archive.org/stream/hearingsregardin1948unit/hearingsregardin1948unit_djvu.txt
you can read the blonde bombshell (now replaced by the read head russian), bently who changed sides…
they had been selecting and penalizing people from the teachers college since before the end of wwii!!!!!!!!
and so, after 40 years of it, they build that system that you talk about as natural, but they kicked it off, and skewed it knowing that if they can make a critical amount, the rest will follow.
the teachers college at Columbia is where the Frankfurt school ended up after Hitler kicked them out for doing the work that made his rule possible!
you realize that we are talking about
* Max Horkheimer
* Theodor W. Adorno
* Herbert Marcuse
* Friedrich Pollock
* Erich Fromm
* Otto Kirchheimer
* Leo Lé¶wenthal
* Franz Leopold Neumann
etc
tell me that these guys didn’t redefine social science and psychology and law?
a professor here who studied under Marcuse is the head of the science area for gifted children. do you think such a marxist equalist will really help them?
it was these guys that created critical theory!!!
who funded them? 🙂
I work directly in this field – it’s a big cottage industry in political science – and I beat this drum a lot in my posts here, so my thoughts on the matter are probably already evident enough.
The problem with social psychology is, intellectually speaking, that it was founded by Marxists and non-Marxist leftists post-WWII who bought the Stalinist line on authoritarianism in the 20th Century – viz., that ALL authoritarianism and totalitarianism was “fascist,” i.e., right wing. The founding document, of course, is Adorno et al.’s Authoritarian Personality.
To speak of self-selection is ok as far as it goes – I don’t think it goes very far in this case – but that would have to take into account the fact that not only is the subject matter intrinsically “leftist” (thinking about group dynamics and empathy and such – which Brad cogently argues is not really a left or right thing in any case), but the actual manner and focus of the research from Day One has been explicitly politicized, indeed, biased toward the left.
The most famous “phenomena” unearthed by the discipline – the Authoritarian Personality, Right-Wing Authoritarianism (known in shorthand as RWA – there is no LWA, nota bene), and so on – are ALL about how to root out the innate fascism of right-wingers. Now the focus has shifted from a Freudio-Marxist grid to evolutionary psychology and genetics (the ground of this is a paper by Alford, Funk, and Hibbing in 2005, where it’s argued that conservatism is largely explained by genes, and conservatism is defined to mean a closedness toward “complexity,” a tendency to hierarchy, and exclusiveness leading to a distaste for foreigners and civil liberties for minorities – i.e., potential Nazism, as always in this field).
Aaron Wildavsky tried to break down this firewall against studying the left way back in the 60’s and 70’s, and no one bit, even though his approach – called Cultural Theory – is arguably the most adequate to capturing the complexity of socio-political dynamics as rooted in psychology AND ideology. Indeed, Haidt himself practices a version of Wildavskian Cultural Theory – one of a very small minority.
Anyway, the facts are simply evident: How many papers and books are there in the field on RWA or some variant thereof? Hundreds, if not thousands. How many on LWA or any sort of potential “authoritarianism” on the left? More or less, zero. Leftism is simply an angelic, freedom-and-equality loving foil for devilish, potentially fascist conservatism in ALL of the literature. ALL of it, from Adorno in the fifties up to the crowd at the conference Haidt spoke at.
I’m saying that self-selection cannot be disentangled in this case from the effects of bias. Whenever I have to do work on these subjects, I always know that I will meet cold stares and looks like “are you crazy?” whenever I suggest studying left-wing authoritarianism, and the effects of leftist egalitarianism on group dynamics. What I mean is, the entire field is simply CLOSED to the idea that such a study could even be conceivable. They laugh it out of the room.
The point is that “self-selection” makes it sound like it’s a quasi-natural thing, like bees going to honey and wasps going elsewhere, but that is not what’s going on. If I was ever honest about my interests in studying left-wing authoritarianism or the effects of egalitarianism on group dynamics, I would NEVER get a job, much less an interview. There is not a chance, even if I did per impossible get a job, that I would ever get anything published. And if I did per impossible get something published it would be summarily ignored.
That is a bit more than a merely adverse incentive structure – it’s like a big Dante-esque sign saying “Abandon all hope, ye conservatives who enter,” or a huge “Conservatives Not Welcome” sign.
I don’t think affirmative action is the right response, but I agree with Haidt completely that it is MOSTLY discrimination, not “self-selection.”
P.S. – as I understand neo’s argument, it is that the initial disproportion was created by the natural gravity of the subject matter, and thereafter the lockout was more or less a foregone conclusion of tribalism, whether conscious or not.
I don’t know – I’m not sure that’s wrong, but there were lots of conservatives studying variants of these themes prior to the advent of social psychology as a field. Once it was cabined in the Adorno/Frankfurt School line, there were none, or very few anyway. That seems to me like more or a lockout from the very beginning. I mean, what did they do to people who tried to crack in, such as Edward Shils and Edward Banfield and Wildavsky?
They ignored them. Those names are not even mentioned in most survey courses. They never really were, and so I think, still, that self-selection played a smaller role than neo gives it.
But correct me if I’ve misinterpreted your point, neo.
P.S. II – here’s Megan McArdle’s take:
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/02/unbiasing-academia/70955/
I think she’s mostly right, especially about the fact that most conservatives are not asking for affirmative action. I certainly am not, and you could probably put me in the “this is a problem without a solution” camp.
A little recognition and a bit more effort to be objective in their research would be fine as far as I’m concerned. What bothers me about it, after all, is the effect the lockout has on our understanding of political phenomena. In particular, it perpetuates the myth that there is no such thing as left-wing authoritarianism, xenophobia, totalitarianism, nationalism, ideological violence, etc. THAT has to stop, and it goes way beyond social psychology.
I think one of Haidt’s points is that, given the disproportion in any other group, the immediate assertion would be conscious discrimination. For some reason, it doesn’t apply to the social sciences.
None of their excuses are allowed to apply when other groups are accused.
I read some of the comments on the NYT site. Plenty of evidence that Haidt is right, if the commenters are similar to social scientists, or liberals in general.
No looking in the mirror for them.
kolnai: I might not have been crystal clear, but I was positing a “yes, and” sort of relationship between the trends, rather than a “first this, and then that” relationship. The subject matter itself, psychology, is probably intrinsically going to attract more leftist types than it will people on the right, just as the arts seem to and writing seems to. But at the same time, it also was founded by and controlled by people on the left, and the more exclusive it gets the more these tendencies feed into themselves to eliminate almost all vestiges of the right from the field.
I wonder, too, whether those three conservatives who raised their hands at the conference and identified as conservatives were actually “changers” who started out as liberals when they entered the field, and then changed somewhere along the way. It wouldn’t surprise me at all.
I read that article and I agree that Haight is a closet conservative subversive. He describes himself as a “liberal turned centrist”. In my experience, few people describe themselves that way – one that comes to mind is a liberal housewife who married a conservative and wants to still be liberal without fighting.
However, that is a liberal in a conservative environment. What we have with Haight is a conservative in a liberal environment. He has to describe himself as a “liberal turned centrist” because that means “please don’t shoot me”. The truth is that most centrists are perfectly happy with being called liberals and living in harmony with liberals in a liberal environment.
To insist on being called a centrist is an unusual thing, it is a flag that someone is going against the grain but doesn’t want to appear too extreme.
Sorry, “Haidt”, not Haight.
For kicks read the liberal’s comments to the story linked. Oh man. This guy shook their little myopic world. And they really have no idea how to handle it except employ deeper denial of the cult they’ve made.
I read the article and instantly thought: this is news?
neo –
I guess I’m just skeptical of the idea that these fields are intrinsically more attractive to leftist types than conservative types. I’m not saying you’re wrong on that, either; my mind just has a hard time believing it.
Anecdotally, I remember a few years ago when my brother was reading Jung and I was reading Freud, we were both surprised to find that both of them were very fervent anti-socialists. The founders of modern psychology, that is, were not leftists – which is not to say they were modern conservatives either – and very many of their epigoni were not leftists either (Aurel Kolnai, for one ;). I don’t know what this proves, but to me it says that there is not much, if anything, in the discipline or subject matter itself that is either left or right.
Raymond Aron wrote a book, in two volumes, on the “Main Currents in Sociological Thought” where he patiently laid out the systems of Montesquieu, Comte, Tocqueville, Marx, Durkheim, Pareto, and Weber – the founders of the “sociological” side of the “social psychology” hybrid. Of those, only Marx and Durkheim are easily classified as leftists. Comte is hard to classify. Montesquieu was a conservative classical liberal; Tocqueville was an aristocratic (reluctant) liberal; Pareto was a conservative classical liberal; and Weber was, like Comte, not really classifiable.
Point is, there was nothing intrinsically leftist or leftist “attracting” about sociology in its origins – it’s just that somehow Marxist sociology won out over what Aron called “political sociology” – in fact, much of Aron’s work is an account of how that happened in France, and as he argues in The Opium of the Intellectuals, it wasn’t because sociology inherently attracted leftist minds more than conservative minds. It was much deeper than that, and one might better phrase it like this: through a complicated cultural process, leftist intellectuals transformed sociology and psychology into fields that would be more attractive to leftist minds.
But when you look at the entire history of psychological and sociological inquiry going back to Plato, I just think it’s hard to maintain the notion that there is something aymmetrically leftist-attracting in their subject matter.
kolnai says,
“… it’s hard to maintain the notion that there is something symmetrically leftist-attracting in their subject matter.”
I think there may be a simple explanation: In academia leftist ideology is predominate and thus there is an inherit bias in what budding psychologists are taught during their formative years. In other words, dogma begets dogma.
Parker, kolnai
There is the positive feedback. That’s one issue. Why it started, so as to generate the positive feedback is another. They are mostly separate, imo.
Psychology has always been a left-wing enterprise, for it has its genesis in rebellion against God.
Neo, you call psychology a science, though you qualify it by saying it’s of the exceedingly soft variety. I don’t consider psychology a science at all. The human psyche is not amenable to the scientific method. Oh, psychological research often has the appearance of employing the scientific method, but so does alternative medicine. It is therefore no proof.
Real science, as in the hard sciences, can and usually does begin from the facts. Psychology can’t, because it deals with subjective constructs all the way along. And so we see, from Freud to Jung to Skinner to Maslow, how every branch of psychology can be traced to a particular pet theory of its founder. That’s not how real science is done.
I go with the method of the great rabbi the Vilna Gaon (fl. the early 18th century). He was already witness to the birth of the Enlightenment, the movement which has done more than anything else to challenge and fracture Judaism. The Vilna Gaon ruled it permissible for Jews to study the sciences (meaning the hard sciences, as well as mathematics), and prohibited to study the humanities.
I’m not going to sugercoat it: Darwin’s theory of evolution has been a headache for a lot of Orthodox Jewish rabbis to this day. Even the most accepting of it can hardly be happy with its broader implications. However, there is a wide swathe of Jewish Orthodoxy that has decided to adopt a detente in the spirit of the Vilna Gaon and declare agnosticism and apathy on the issue. Or in other words: “We don’t care about it much, because we don’t think it’s all that important.” That’s the point of view I hold. Orthodox Judaism can hold this position because the Vilna Gaon made the position tenable.
But the same doesn’t go for the humanities and the “soft sciences.” The sages of Judaism insist that, while knowledge about the physical world is open to all of humanity in equal fashion, the same cannot be said about spiritual things. There, if you don’t go according to what God the Creator has taught, then you don’t know; and if you go according to your own ideas and theories, you have nothing but lies.
Psychology is an example of such a system of lies. Whether it’s Freud with his idea of sexuality underlying the human psyche, or Jung with his pagan archetypes, or Skinner’s mechanomorphic conception, or Maslow’s unfounded optimism about humanity, all are human theories. All ignore HaShem’s say on the matter, and some of them (like Freud’s, dating from the same period as Nietzsche and Marx; enough said) are in direct rebellion against it.
Psychology and left-wing ideology are therefore a perfect match: When you consider how it is a pillar of the Left to ignore HaShem’s messages concerning the nature of humanity or even rebel against them outright, it is no wonder that it attracts so many on the Left, and so few on the Right. I don’t think there should be more conservatives in that “profession” at all, which is at best a scam.
Darwin’s system, whatever one might think about it, teaches something or other about the real world. In contrast, Freud’s system teaches only about Freud. The exclusively subjective nature of psychology, as of the humanities in general, goes a long way toward explaining why it is a left-wing ivory tower.
http://chronicle.com/article/Augusta-State-U-Is-Accused-of/123650/. Basically, this grad student in counseling is being given remedial classes and faces expulsion if she doesn’t change her view that homosexuality is choice. But gosh, I for one can’t figure out why the psych field isn’t diversified.
ziontruth: I’m not familiar with the rabbinical and/or Orthodox aspects of the issue, but when I wrote that psychology is a soft science I meant that it is hardly even a science at all in the same sense of the word as we apply it to physics or chemistry.
That said, there are many many different types of psychology. The article and my post probably did not make it clear, but the group Haidt was talking to does not consist of therapists, and they are not related to Freud, Maslow, et al. “Personality and social psychologists” are mainly researchers/academics who try to study human behavior empirically. IMHO much of their work is garbage in garbage out because of the difficulty of operationalizing their terms and their utter inability to control variables in any meaningful way.
Neo,
I was just trying to give a point of view as to why Leftists are so dominant in the humanities in general, and psychology in particular.
As you say, the non-therapist researchers are hampered by the inability to apply the scientific method to the human psyche. Consequently, I think, those researchers would eventually have to walk the same way Freud and Maslow did: Base their research on the non-scientific pillar of some pet theory.
I’d also like to note that my [over]long piece above doesn’t apply to psychiatry. Whatever problems one might point regarding psychiatry, it should be considered a hard science because it doesn’t deal with the human psyche per se but with the way the body (especially brain chemistry) influences the human psyche. It is a branch of conventional medicine.
Psychology, social or individual, certainly is not a science, since its main tool, introspection, does not belong to scientific method, and its subject, human psyche, can not be defined by objective means or described in strictly defined terms. This is a philosophy, and like any philosophy its perspective is defined by prevalent worldview. This makes this field especially attractive to those who can not successfully pass exams in math and hard sciences, so they chose careers where criteria of academic achievement are vague and arbitrary and mostly consist in conformity to approved views and “narrative”.
There is a solution: cut off their funding.
An interesting post but you go off the rails here in your comments:
You can’t applaud the conservative social psychologist (who applied stats and narrative to make his point) and then condemn the social science methodology.
People who hold conservative values should be concerned with the lack of conservative-inspired research hypotheses. But attacking the methodology itself is weak.
The blogosphere is just so much amateur social psychology, minus any methodology or even a nod to rigor.
That is a hypothesis that could be tested in a study.
I’m with Oblio. Has Social Psychology, as a discipline, accomplished anything to increase the well being of people who aren’t getting paid by Social Psychology departments? Has it helped cure the mad, prevent crime, or help people get along? As near as I can tell it has done the opposite.
Social psychology will be a science when the results you get from asking a teenager to take out the trash is predictable.
At least, this is my experience of applied mathematician in working with specialists in education theory and cognitive psychology. Most of them do not understand basic assumptions behind statistical methology, never ask themselves if their data obey statistical stability, they usually assume normal distribution when there is no indication of this, robotically apply statistical formulae not applicable for empirical distributions they deal with, and so on. May be, this is better in USA than in Russia, but somehow I doubt it.
Steve … 🙂
Childrens Home Responsibilities: Factors Predicting Childrens Household Work
DJ Cheal – Social Behavior and Personality: an international …, 2003
(cited by 6)
And also …
Research on household labor: Modeling and measuring the social embeddedness of routine family work
S Coltrane – Journal of Marriage and Family, 2000
(cited by 588)
The influence of parental attitudes and behaviors on children’s attitudes toward gender and household labor in early adulthood
M Cunningham – Journal of Marriage and Family, 2001
(cited by 65)
The effects of family characteristics and time use on teenagers’ household labor
CT Gager, TM Cooney – Journal of Marriage and the Family, 1999
(cited by 56)
Adolescents’ chores: The difference between dual-and single-earner families
MH Benin, Journal of Marriage and the Family, 1990
(cited by 53)
Sergey:
Psychology, social or individual, certainly is not a science, since its main tool, introspection, does not belong to scientific method,..At least, this is my experience of applied mathematician in working with specialists in education theory and cognitive psychology. Most of them do not understand basic assumptions behind statistical methodology…May be, this is better in USA than in Russia, but somehow I doubt it
If anything, it is worse in the US. It certainly isn’t better in the US. There is a very strong tendency in schools of education in the US to present conjecture as fact.
Even more damning are the attitudes of humanitarians toward mathematics and other elements of scientific method they include in their work. For them, these are magic tools, just evocation of which somehow can bring about rigour and certainty to vague concepts and noisy, inconclusive data. This makes these studies akin to cargo cult, with airplanes from straw and bamboo control towers.
Writing off an entire academic field by arguing most of its scholars are sloppy statisticians is crazy talk.
The main problem here is not that these scholars are sloppy statisticians, but that if they were good statisticians this field hardly could exist. Most of these papers simply would not be written, if authors understood that philosophy is not a science, and all trapping of scientific method can not disguise the fact that emperor has no clothes.
Altemeyer: Sergey puts it quite nicely. It has nothing to do with sloppiness, it is the field itself. And it has nothing to do with whether the scientists are conservative or liberal. It would be true of either.
The same problem plagues many other fields, like evolution theory, climatology, economics and so on. The very notion of natural selection assumes a statistical approach to favorable mutations, ascribing them probabilities. But they have not probabilities – not even very small probabilities. This stochastic process simply does not allow probabilistic interpretation. Such stochastic processes also dominate economy in crises, so no scientific theory is applicable to it. Many, many so called natural phenomena defy study by scientific method, and the sooner public will aknowledge this, the better.
Well there’s nothing like job security when an infinite array of variables have to be get fully examined and explained before you run out of work. 🙂
Attempts to develop rigorous theories of ever changing fussy realities are akin to attempts to nail jello to a wall. Climate, for example, is a weather statistics. The basic assumption of using statistics is statistical stability of the data. So, the concept of climate change is contradiction of terms: without stability, there is no meaningful statistics, so ever changing climate can not be statistically defined. (In more technical terms: all observational time series would be too short to infer estimates of needed accuracy, and different periods are not comparable.) Analoguosly, the number of possible genotypes for a species are gazzilion times more than the number of individuals that can exist from its emergence to its extinction, so every population is a statistically unrepresentative sample. Gene dynamics of any non-bacterial species can not be described in statistical terms, which makes any statistical formulation of evolution theory impossible.
I took last night off from reading… my loss, and this article, and Haidt’s powerpoint which I watched were the most significant events of my day.
So, I sit down at a faculty meeting and one our psych faculty asks me if I had seen the article in the NYT. He knows my politics, and he is one of the most PC/progressives on the faculty. I know, I know,….one of the herd.
He was shaken. He didn’t know that libs outnumber conservative 90/10. Talk about living in a cocoon, but it’s just another point in Haidt’s favor of the tribal nature of academia. Later, after I found the link to Haidt’s powerpoint, I sent him the link along with some of my own experiences which parallel the grad student’s in Haidt’s talk. I also told him about some “hate” emails I’ve received from faculty. He profoundly thanked me. I’ve been thinking about this for over a day now. This fellow is what I would describe as a “gentle soul”, but so wrapped up in the tribe culture that this has totally shaken his foundations.
Empathy may be the key here. I think what really got to him is the idea that he and his cohorts have been treating conservative faculty in the same way a 1950’s racist would treat blacks. A definite “look in the mirror moment”.
“”that he and his cohorts have been treating conservative faculty in the same way a 1950’s racist would treat blacks. A definite “look in the mirror moment”.””
Physicsguy
And they do it as though they haven’t any insight their excuses for behaving this way nearly mirrors the 1950’s racist. Knuckle dragging, mouth breathers, backwards, stupid, ignorant, uneducated….
physicsguy, I have no doubt that Haidt’s just dramatically cracked open new publishing opportunities and research proposals are going to start flooding the ethics committees.
Concerns re. operationalizing terms, controlling variables and detecting bias inform critiques of individual papers or scholars. Throwing out the field is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
Speaking of operationalizing terms, how hard would it be to design an instrument to test your theory of Palin hatred among women?
I don’t see the design being all that complicated, and it would make for a pretty interesting read.
Altemeyer, let’s just put it this way: I know the field. I’ve even worked in the field. And believe me, this baby is the bathwater.
There you go then.
Sergey,
“The same problem plagues many other fields, like evolution theory, climatology, economics and so on.”
I think those fields are different (maybe economics not so much). It seems to me those are amenable to the scientific method, but the existence of strong vested interests causes them to undergo a process of intellectualization, thus pushing them into the mire of unscientific cloudiness.
Take evolution, for example: Neither of the two main sides of this controversy could bring themselves to concede error. An evolutionist on the order of Richard Dawkins has a vested interest in maintaining this pillar of materialism, while a creationist like Ken Ham thinks the slightest compromise with evolution means the Bible can be thrown in the trash. The scientific method can operate, but it is heavily impeded by vested interests.
Psychology is different: Vested interests don’t matter here, because the scientific method cannot apply to the field in the first place. This is no mere impediment but a contradiction by nature, much as music theory cannot be applied to fluid dynamics.
Evolution’s a fact, ziontruth. Buy it. You’ll sleep better.
Altemeyer,
Why don’t you read my first comment on this thread instead of engaging in knee-jerk preaching? Short version, in case you don’t have the time (or the mood) for that: I’m agnostic and apathetic about the whole creation-evolution controversy; I don’t know and I don’t think it’s important (as far as my religious beliefs are concerned, at any rate).
physicsguy,
I find empathy to be the main key – it really does unlock something in a liberal.
Liberals and conservatives are where they are based on their observations and employed common sense.
It is my belief that liberals (as I was one) choose to blind themselves to facts – and suspend common sense for certain subjects that make them liberal.
They may do fine in the computer field, construction, welding, etc but usually those fields have a higher percentage of conservatives because you have to see the insanity of the mental disease called liberalism.
I choose my words in all seriousness.
A liberal reading this may be offended.
A liberal reading this may just believe conservatives have a mental disease.
I don’t mind – my message may stick with them for some time – and may wake up someone.
Look people!!! 99% of people have compassion. 99% of people want clean air, good education, everyone to live comfortably etc.
But the 50% of liberals believe the 50% of conservatives are evil to the core. ???? WT Heck?
And the 50% of conservatives understand that the rank and file liberals have rose colored glasses, are well-intentioned, etc. We give them credit!@!@! It is the liberal leaders we don’t give credit and we QUESTION whether the liberal leaders are fools or knaves openly.
What is the best way to bring prosperity, the ability to feed the world, clean the air, etc? Socialism or communism? No.
Capitalism.
Capitalism defined is the people choosing who gets what resources.
People choosing with their dollar. People choosing to work for someone or not work for someone. Pay for something or not pay for something.
Central planning simply defeats prosperity time and time again.
This nation will do much better always with a smaller government that serves the purposes of national security and helping those who are not able-bodied or elderly. There are certain constitutional duties of the federal government and it less able to meet those obligations because politicians have diluted the ability of the federal government to meet those obligations..
Additionally, we are approaching 100% of GDP with our debt. It is unsustainable.
How compassionate is that dear liberal ???? To leave a nation so weak to our young.
I had an old friend and unabashed progressive who sent me a link to the Times article. She was shaken, mainly, I think, because it appeared in the Times. I’ll bet a lot of people were shaken out of the circle dance for just a minute. I won’t say she has taken the Red Pill.
I’ll bet some editor’s head will roll at the Times over this one. This is sort of like the Soviet Union failing to veto the authorization to use force to expel North Korea from South Korea because it was boycotting the U.N. Security Council; it won’t happen again.
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Ziontruth, I’d read your earlier post but didn’t realize it was the same author, sorry.
Neo-neocon, would your Palin-hatred post be less credible if you captured the language used by your circle of liberal female friends, and compared it to the language used by a control group?
I figure it comes down to this: blogosphere pundits and their readers are quite comfortable proposing their own social psychology theories and do so routinely (including in this thread), but because the conclusions drawn by formal methodologies are distasteful, the defense involves undermining the methodology — and not of a particular study, nor of a particular academic, but of the entire field. It’s medieval.
The solution’s instead to get more conservatives into the field, as Haidt himself argued. If you believe liberalism has recognizable characteristics and undesirable effects, prove it. There’s enough hot air already.
fyi, I have a graduate degree in a social sciences field and I’ve worked in it, too.
http://www.politico.com/politico44/perm/0211/just_a_little_bit_868941d7-3826-4a53-9390-43550fabcd93.html
speaking of someone who doesn’t get it.
Has she offered these same words to a Republican President?
No.
There were films depicting the assassination of Bush. Michelle Malkin has journaled the absolute hatred. I’ve seen it here in the belly of the beast in Sacramento.
Where were you Oprah????
Least you misunderstand.
I don’t hate Obama. 99.9% of what I see are people talking about his ideas and the misery they bring this country. We are free to do that. Thank yo much.
We ALL want a better country. We all have a good heart.
Altemeyer: you don’t really mean to compare the personal opinion writing of a blogger with the results of social science research, and to hold them to the same rules?
The fact that you have worked in the field doesn’t tell me anything about the field itself. Most people in the field probably think it’s worthwhile. I do not, for the most part. I actually think the fact that it is soft science masquerading as hard science is somewhat misleading, and it can be used to give a scientific veneer to information that is no more scientific than the opinions of a blogger—or a blogger’s commenters.
Neo,
There is one more issue I have with the field. It attracts a lot of young – to get thier college degrees in psychology etc.
So many parents have taken seconds on their homes (hard cash) to throw into the toilet basically.
There are countless fields like this.
My girlfriend’s sister just sent her 4.0 college student to UCLA and she graduated with a 4 year degree last year. She got her degree win International diplomacy.
Guess where she was working after not being able to find a job? An adoption agency.
Her mother and the student were CONNED. OK. Conned is a strong word.
But people need to get into fields like engineering, construction, forensics, chemistry, etc.
Hard work yes. But it isn’t a con job. It’s a true skill.
The soft science fields are basically not a true skill. Most of us have more common sense – period.
Who, me? But I’m just a blogger.
It matters that your opinions shape the opinions of your readers.
Depending on the source of the info, the average academic paper is read by 1.2, 3 or 7 people. At university I was told it was one.
How many hits has your site received since you started blogging?
It’s all a conversation vying for attention space and shaping opinion. Bloggers such as yourself do, in fact, dabble in social psychology routinely. And the readers too. It’s everywhere.
You can complain that that academic work benefits from a veneer of authority, but it’s bizarre to fault people for applying rigor where you don’t.
I only provided my background in response to your assumption that I didn’t know the field:
Altemeyer: no, I didn’t assume you didn’t know the field. I don’t assume anything about your background.
But “I’m just a blogger” is not just an excuse, it’s a fact that completely differentiates me from a social scientist publishing supposed scientific research. I am writing opinion journalism. I base it as best I can on facts of history and science, but bloggers are inherently unscientific opinion writers.
I am quite aware of the political background of many of the founders of the field.
like mr Marx himself… 🙂
Your piece on the Palin-hatred phenomenon is social psychology. You have a neat little hypothesis, a sample group, and even a methodology. It’s informal but it’s earnest:
That is the overriding attitude, and it’s real and it goes deep.
Of course if you try to measure this stuff it turns into a pink unicorn and flies away.
Neocon, I love this blog you wrote and obviously I’m not alone. The comments are fascinating to someone like me who knows nothing of these fields.
I tend to agree with Kolnai that neither social workers, shrinks nor artists are necessarily Lib or conserv. Maybe that’s because my father was an insanely liberal research chemist.
In a statist bureaucracy, everyone must justify their piece of the pie with numbers. Absent such an all encompassing bureaucracy, most people value many things in life which can’t be justified by numbers and ‘science’.
I submit that the statist bureaucracy is happiest with social scientists who advocate the supremacy of knowledge that enables and justifies statist policies: liberal policies. Conservative thought, almost by definition, is not friendly to statist goals.
Altemeyer: you can say it as many times and in as many ways as you want, but that doesn’t make it true.
Writing opinion essays on a subject that could be studied using the methods of social psychology research does not make it social psychology research (or any sort of science, hard or soft). Thinking logically (or trying to) and writing what you think is not the same as doing science. Surely you know that. And surely you know we were talking about whether social psychology research is valid as science, not as opinion or speculation or essays.
I never said your Palin piece was social psychology research, just that it emulated its form. Research requires measurement. Pink unicorn. See above.
What I implied is that you’re giving yourself a free pass to play with this stuff while dismissing the work of people who take a great deal more care before publishing.
How many hits has your work received since you started blogging?
Altemeyer: If you still don’t understand the difference between a blog post and social science research, including the fact that they have different forms, I certainly am not going to waste more time trying to convince you.
As for your last question, do you know what a sitemeter is? There’s one on this blog.
Reyemetla (Altemeyer),
You are looking at things sdrawkcab (backwards).
That’s my hypothesis.
Seriously, and this is because it’s been an observation – have you smoked marijuana more than a year in your life?
Words mean things bro.
Sorry you feel this exchange was a waste of your time. Carry on with your comforting projections onto the conservative and liberal mind. I’m sure it’s good fun for your (rather enormous) audience. You might want to look about for your ethics though, you seemed to have dropped them when you left therapy for punditry.
Altemeyer: you are obviously a troll, but a rather unusual one whose motivations are obscure to me. It was a waste of time communicating with you because you never wanted to actually have an exchange of ideas, nor to listen to what I’m saying; you wanted to follow your agenda, whatever it might be (still don’t really know, except it seems to have something to do with defending the honor of social science researchers).
Ethics, you say? Now it’s unethical to criticize social science research and researchers? It’s unethical to have such opinions while still using logic to frame arguments, and trying to look at the evidence before you?
Your reasoning is, quite simply, bizarre. If you’re an example of the logic used by social scientists, the field is in even worse shape than I previously thought.
Neo, recently there have been self-admitted crusaders from the Left who want to influence the “discussion” on conservative blogs. I guess their purported goals are to “correct” what they see as fundamental mistakes by controlling the flow. Which can make them akin to trolls, but also not trolls.
He reminds me of Zach, a noted Global Warmist that goes around talking about the IPCC’s “scientific authority” and how there is a “scientific consensus” that Global Warming exists. Any other authority that says otherwise, any other scientist that says otherwise, can’t be true because they don’t gib with the “consensus”.
Social scientists have easily sled into the region where they believe themselves gods on earth, invested with the power to play with the lives of lesser mortals. It’s because they lost their humility and their recognition of their proper place.
My only motivation is to give you pause.
Social psychology is volatile stuff and you’re indulging in it, whether you admit it or not, leveraging your own veneer as a therapist to lend credibility to your assessments, for a very large audience indeed.
Academics recognize the harm that conclusions drawn in the social sciences may cause and so apply robust mechanisms to safeguard against publishing unsubstantiated opinion.
Presumably you were an academic, once upon a time, and you understood the hazards and the social responsibility.
Ymarsakar, where did that come from?
I don’t have a blanket suspicion of qualitative research. I think the Haidt story is a great development.
If Neo-con were to pursue a PhD in social psychology and after five years publish a doctoral thesis on Palin-hate syndrome, would you dismiss it out of hand because of its undeserved veneer of hard science?
I suspect you’d read it in a comfortable chair with a glass of scotch.
In response to JanYC way at the top of the comments thread:
That’s not true and it’s not at all fair. It’s an extremely glaring oversimplification to say that “liberals don’t take the long view” or “don’t care about taking the long view”. Excuse me, but that is exactly how I look at the world: in the long term. I always have and I always will do so, exactly BECAUSE in order to help as many people as much of the time as possible, you HAVE to take the long view. It is essential…always. Yes, I also want to help those who are more unfortunate than others and this is generally speaking a (and please note, not the ONLY) priority of mine…but the point is it should be everyone’s priority, regardless of how loudly you want to shout that you are conservative or liberal or something else. In other words, this way of thinking isn’t somehow exclusive to liberals or conservatives or libertarians or any such label you want to throw at people, and I cringe a little (ok, a lot) when people try to make it sound like it is.
Conservatives I read or listen to so often make it sound like caring about the fortunes of others…ALL others, to be exact…is somehow a shame or an embarrassment – it’s a dirty thing and it’s “just not practical, dear”. That’s not what they say, of course, but that’s the feeling I’m often left with…including after I had finished reading this very post by NeoCon. To that I say…no actually, this is what empathy is and it’s a natural human trait…thankfully…and believe it or not, people including liberals are actually capable of feeling a wider empathy for others in the world AND taking a long view of matters IN THE WORLD. It’s a shame people don’t seem to understand this point in the all-too politicized and insular minefield of American politics.
In addition to the above, I wanted to re-post here a response that I originally wrote in another venue pertaining to the original blog entry. My mother shared the blog entry by NeoCon on Google with myself and some others and I wrote a response there about certain other aspects of the arguments presented that I’d like to share here as well:
I really have to point out something about this article that to me, having studied at some point or another a rather wide range of arts and letters ALONG WITH psychology and the like, is rather irksome. To quote:
“Personality and social psychology is a research science, but of the exceedingly soft variety; you might call it the science of the study of feelings, especially as they are expressed in group dynamics (personality psychology does the same for individuals), and as such it would be no surprise it would appeal disproportionately to liberals.”
Characterizing personality and social psychology as merely “the science of feelings” is just plain false, which is all the more bothersome here because the author seems to be using this assertion in such a pejorative manner. Yes, psychology and the other social sciences are fundamentally very different “sciences,” I would agree, from the so-called hard sciences of physics or chemistry or the like…in spite of all of academia’s efforts to dress psychology up in statistics and experiments and such:-) BUT personality and social psychology are hardly just the “science of feelings” and anyone who truly believes otherwise either hasn’t been paying attention or, clearly, hasn’t ever actually studied psychology!
Part and parcel of these branches of psychology, of course, is a study of emotion as pertains to human behavior. You can’t study human beings, so far as they can be “studied,” without studying also their feelings. Clearly. But just as clearly, what we traditionally term “feelings” or “emotions” are not by any means the ONLY components of one’s personality and patterns of behavior in social contexts. There is a whole lot more to us, and therefore social or personality psychology, than that! This is immediately evidenced in the very same quote the author of this post tries to use to damn social psychology…in the very first sentence shown: “How do people think about, influence, and relate to one another?” This is the central question in the society’s mission statement it would appear…and so I ask, how in the least is this only about feelings? I guess I read it rather differently than the author of this post…
On top of all this, though…I’m really at a loss as to how anything about the author’s assertion that “social/personality psychology = feelings” is related to the thesis that started the post, which is that conservatives feel all excluded and whatnot from the academic or professional circles of personality and social psychology. I’m sorry, but…what was the connection here again? “Personality/social psychology = exclusive concern with feelings = more liberals = less conservatives.” I don’t really get it…
The Shepherd: Here is the exact quote:
I could have further refined it by adding “thoughts” and “behaviors” to the word “feelings,” which would have been the more traditional definition. But that seems overbroad to me: it’s not thoughts in general (social psychology doesn’t encompass the history of science or philosophy, for example) or all behavior, but both thought and behavior in relation to feelings. That doesn’t mean that every social science research paper deals with feelings (for example, if you consider criminology a subset of social psychology, it is far more behavior oriented; but there we are in a subject that is usually considered sociology rather than social psychology). No doubt there is a better definition than mine, but I haven’t seen one.
But my point about the softness of the science applies not only to social psychology, but to much of psychology and sociology as well. It also applies to a fair percentage of medical research. It potentially applies to most research with human subjects, and it is not a flaw of the researchers (although certainly they sometimes commit errors) but is inherent in the subject matter itself. The system is too complex and not enough variables can be controlled.
As for the rest: you have touched on a common misconception among liberals (and a source of their earnest moral arrogance): they are the ones who care, and conservatives do not. I would submit that both care deeply, but conservatives disagree on the remedy. For further elucidation, please do yourself a favor and read Thomas Sowell’s The Vision of the Anointed. It’s an excellent book on the subject.
Yes, we’ll all be much better off filling our heads with culture war opinion than attending to the social sciences. I do not believe there is a thinking person here who does not understand this to be sinister nonsense.
Jonathan Haidt on the moral roots of liberals and conservatives
NeoCon…you seem to have missed both of the points I was trying to make in my original response. To clarify:
1) Never once in my response did I say about liberals that I believe “‘they are the ones who care, and conservatives do not.” Please read again. My point was that avowed conservatives often make it sound as if liberals care somehow “too much” in general and are therefore weaker and less practical because of it. Your post didn’t contain that exact statement, but you opened yourself up immediately to this line of criticism when you chose to make such bold (and, once again, false) statements such as “Many if not most of these fields are artistic endeavors, and/or are concerned primarily with feelings rather than hard facts or practical and technical matters.” The connection with your original thesis is that since liberals seem to predominate the “‘fields” mentioned above, liberals then are also the ones who predominantly care more for feelings above all else than with rational facts and technical matters. Not only is this an inaccurate and needless blanket implication with regards to one’s politics, it already rests upon one blatantly false assumption about the sciences anyway, leading to my next point…
2) Let me reiterate: adding “thoughts” and “behaviors” to “feelings” in your definition of social or personality psychology is not “going overboard.” Hardly. Rather it would have provided you and your readers the CORRECT definition of those fields of inquiry and study and should have been in your post to begin with. In other words, an accurate definition of social psychology would have read, for example: it is the study of thoughts, behaviors, feelings and other cognitive acts within the context of a society, culture or indeed any form of interpersonal relationship between between/among two or more individuals. This is a much closer to correct definition of this field of study than you gave anywhere in your original post. Again far from going overboard, you stopped short of what was called for. Presenting social psychology as “the study of feelings” and leaving it essentially at that is just incorrect. People need to be exact about such matters and I’m quite happy in reminding people of this.
Taken together these criticisms and refinements of your reasoning change the impact I think of your original post rather significantly, and add some more (perhaps undesired) complication to your original thesis about conservatives in social psychology. Ultimately, the argument that conservatives are excluded from social and personality psychology because of these fields’ nearly exclusive focus on “feelings” is faulty on a few fronts as elaborated in both my posts, and is a disservice as much to fellow conservatives as to liberals or anyone in between.
The Shepherd, here’s Neo-neocon on empathy vis practicality.
Check out Haidt’s TED talk, if you haven’t already.
You might also enjoy this conservative’s blog.
Thank you, Altemeyer. I read the discussions you recommended (I must check out the TED talk still), and I think the posts on the other blog are particularly pertinent to NeoCon’s original post here (which is all the more ironic, of course, because the blog you recommended is also a conservative blog…ostensibly).
I’ve come across articles and essays myself that present essentially the same information as in the discussions you highlighted in regards to the question of how certain groups in American culture define or perceive morality. And it seems in my experience the findings presented concerning what categories of social valuation Republicans and Democrats, for example, pay most attention to under the umbrella concept “morality” hold quite true…which as subtext, also says a lot I believe about both mine and NeoCon’s reasoning here.
Any argument over who cares “more or less,” in some over-arching socio-political sense, is pretty meaningless, and wasn’t ever my point to begin with in my responses. Rather, I wanted to point out (along with the false definition of social or personality psychology in the first place) this narrow-minded duality of “rationality vs. feelings”/”strength vs weakness”/”idealism vs practicality” that laced NeoCon’s original points from start to finish, and then was bolstered by other posters’ comments. Conservatives misguidedly accuse liberals of “caring too much,” liberals undeservingly accuse conservatives of “caring less” (an accusation I never endorsed here). Both assertions of course are biased and trivializing, but as a novice social psychologist and researcher, I think this portion in particular of the other blog discussion you highlighted, Altemeyer, hits on the root cause of these misgivings on both sides quite nicely:
“(I point out in that post that the Democrats’ two favorites basically characterize the gold standard of morality: The Golden Rule. Three of the Republicans’ favored tenets have nothing to do with – are often or mostly antithetical to – that rule.)”
Everyone can decide for themselves what “spheres of morality” they hold to be most important in their lives. But the laying out of Republicans’ and Democrats’ most typical moral valuations, seems quite accurate if you’re at all well read in American politics and sociology…and furthermore seems to mirror many of the ideological divides between “conservatives” and “liberals” more generally.
This is brilliant! I love the study of psychology (especially from a forensic perspective and most especially when psychoanalyzing totalitarianism and collectivist groupthink), socionics, social engineering, and socio-ergonomics. I’ve found that liberals tend to favor social engineering using psychology as a mechanism of social control based on the Soviet model, whereas “conservatives” (in the American sense of the word which is the opposite of the Eurotrash concept) tend to allow socio-ergonomics to develop without state intervention. In essence, this means that — in terms of social psychology — liberals are fascists and conservatives are anarchists. This could explain why liberals regard conservatives as inherently “sociopathic.”
It’s not so much about order versus chaos but rather the nature of order and chaos and how we define them. The assumption that liberals favor chaos (freedom) while conservatives favor order (oppression) is obviously flawed because it fails to explain liberals’ use of government to bring about their concept of order. Plus it’s usually conservatives — or more specifically, right-wing Nationalists (booyah!) — who advocate a more laissez-faire approach to socionics.
To the American right, social “order” simply means that people should behave themselves as civilized and enlightened human beings. This concept of order is compatible with freedom. In fact, freedom can’t exist without this kind of order. This kind of order does not require the individual to abandon their sense of identity to appease to the collective. That kind of order appeals to those who favor global government and totalitarianism (socialists, fascists, liberals, etc.).
In the mindset of a right-wing American (keep in mind that mainstream conservatives aren’t truly right-wing), a left-wing status quo represents fatalism, moral degeneracy, glorification of weakness and mediocrity, defeatism toward and appeasement of one’s oppressors, abolition of national sovereignty, and worst of all, abolition of individual identity. If being a rugged individualist is sociopathic, then we should all be sociopaths. In a world where humanity is oppressed by left-wing “altruists,” right-wing “sociopaths” become the ultimate champions of human liberty.
>>No World Order