Is Social Psychology Biased Against Republicans?

http://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/social-psychology-biased-republicans

by clarkm • 12 years ago

39 68 12 years ago

privong2• 12 years ago

But where were the hard numbers that pointed to bias, be it in the selection of professionals or the publication process, skeptics asked? ... Maybe it was the case that liberals simply wanted to become professors more often than conservatives.

Interesting. I wonder if those same people would explain a lack of gender diversity in tech as "women aren't interested in tech", or an analogous feeling in other fields? I guess I do not have an understanding for how much of that reaction is a general attitude towards diversity versus a reactionary stance in regards to the suggestion of a lack of diversity in one's own domain of work/expertise/culture/experience.

But the percentages varied. Regarding economic affairs, approximately nineteen per cent called themselves moderates, and eighteen per cent, conservative. On foreign policy, just over twenty-one per cent were moderate, and ten per cent, conservative. It was only on the social-issues scale that the numbers reflected Haidt’s fears: more than ninety per cent reported themselves to be liberal, and just under four per cent, conservative.

Certainly the social issues are more extreme, but having a ~70% to 10% ratio of liberal to conservative thinking for foreign policy is still very lopsided. I think all three categories would be considered too lopsided, not just the last one.

gizmo6862• 12 years ago

Interesting. I wonder if those same people would explain a lack of gender diversity in tech as "women aren't interested in tech"?

Contrary to the declaration of independence, it is not self-evident that all people are equal. We can say that the lack of women in tech is primarily a result of cultural reasons because we have evidence that there is minimal innate, relevent, difference. We have not shown this to be the case with political parties. Furthermore, we have reason to believe that this is not the case, because political parties carry with them values and ideologies.

Certainly the social issues are more extreme, but having a ~70% to 10% ratio of liberal to conservative thinking for foreign policy is still very lopsided. I think one all three categories would be too lopsided, not just the last one.

Is there a reason that 50%-50% is ideal? Consider the climate change debate; I do not consider it a problem that the scientific community is lopsided on this issue. Simmilarly, it may be the case that an understanding of these fields tends to make people lean liberal.

refurb• 12 years ago

You're confusing political belief with scientific opinion. There is nothing wrong with nearly everyone holding one scientific opinion. I would say there is something wrong with a lack of diversity (political or otherwise).

JackFr4• 12 years ago

If we consider the academic ecosystem from an evolutionary standpoint, the most important thing to recognize is that objective truth is not the measure of fitness, the ability to command a budget is.

Those academics survive who can sell, who can get grants and budgets, who can get paid and who can hire. It is nice to believe that these abilities are correlated with the ability to discover new truths. Over the longer term it certainly is and in hard sciences moreso, but in the short and medium term and in subjects as loosey goosey as social psychology (where being wrong has virtually no measurable consequence) it is certainly less so.

The conclusion then might be that liberals, rather than being better truth seekers, are simply better at funnelling public money through their offices.

tthomas48• 12 years ago

I think if you read the article more closely using those examples was supposed to be pointing out lazy thinking, not actually advocating those as legitimate answers.

privong2• 12 years ago

Perhaps, though I did more than simply skim the article. If that was the intent, the author probably could have done a better job of making that point.

muuh-gnu6• 12 years ago

Academia _as a whole_ is biased against republicans/libertarians/capitalists and toward the state, i.e. towards leftism, because thats where their paychecks come from. He who pays the piper, calls the tune.

gress4• 12 years ago

What you are saying here implies that Republicans are biased against academia, not the other way around.

jiggy20114• 12 years ago

If one of these statements is true then it's more likely that the other one is also true. It's a chicken and egg relationship.

fit2rule• 12 years ago

Why not both?

muuh-gnu6• 12 years ago

Not necessarily Republicans, since they are statists too, although somewhat less than Dems.

But for the sake of argument, yes, conservatives tend to be biased against statist academia because they are aware that since academia wouldnt exist without a state it is biased toward the state and against contra-statists.

The notion that conservatives would indeed be biased against an independent, non-statist academia, simply because they are -as is often implied- biased against knowlege itself, is not convincing.

vdaniuk2• 12 years ago

Academia ... republicans/libertarians/capitalists ... state ... leftism.

There are so many generalizations that this statement loses any value. Also state == leftism? What about fascist and quasi-fascist states?

muuh-gnu6• 12 years ago

Also state == leftism?

Precisely.

What about fascist and quasi-fascist states?

Fascism, communism, nazism, socialism, etc, are subsets of leftism/statism.

b_emery• 12 years ago

If people in academia were that driven by money, they wouldn't be in academia.

muuh-gnu6• 12 years ago

They _are_ driven by the money that is necessary to finance academia.

They wouldnt be in academia if adacemia had to actually earn the money it needs to exist.

omg2k• 12 years ago

People in academia are absolutely driven by money: they need funding to purchase equipment, hire grad students, and pay their salary. Also, whether or not to grant tenure is judged (in part) by how much grant money an assistant professor has brought into the university.

mikeash• 12 years ago

That explains why academia is so pro-military. Oh, wait....

Florin_Andrei4• 12 years ago

Oh, yes, those money-hungry academics, driving their Ferraris all day long...

muuh-gnu6• 12 years ago

Even if they all rode rusty bicycles, basic logic implies that they won't/can't bite the hand that feeds them simply because obviously nobody else would voluntarily feed them and they're (obviously) intelligent enough to realize this.

Its a synergy. The state provides the academia funds nobody else would voluntarily provide them. In return, academia produces statists. Cue vicious circle of win-win.

kazinator2• 12 years ago

Plenty of academics (and others) bite the hand that feeds them: they take their money from exactly those whom they criticize.

This is in fact necessary for academic freedom. Just because you fund something at some university doesn't mean you get to dictate everyone's public expression there, as if that institution were a corporate subsidiary.

However, in practice, those who are close to some particular project involving an outside agency probably face repercussions if they express criticism of that agency.

gress4• 12 years ago

One could equally ask the question, "Are Republicans Biased against Social Psychology"?

Social conservatism generally seeks to preserve existing power relationships. Science is about discovering new understanding.

Unless we've already passed the peak of understanding of the human condition and factored that into our politics (which is an implication of conservatism), social psychology will keep challenging conservatives.

Political views are not just different flavors. They have structural implications about what ideas one is willing to entertain. It would be much more disturbing if there was not bias here.

JackFr4• 12 years ago

Social conservatism generally seeks to preserve existing power relationships. Science is about discovering new understanding.

The lack of self awareness on HN is profound. Sure, confirmation bias exists, but that's mostly a problem for other guys, not me.

Florin_Andrei4• 12 years ago

"Everyone is stupid, except me." - Homer Simpson

gress4• 12 years ago

You are going to need to explain. Those statements are definitional. If you are trying to assert that scientists also seek to preserve their own power, this is true. However the point here is that social conservatism is opposed to the project of social psychology, not its biases.

kenjackson• 12 years ago

This seems like the most obvious line of reasoning, I'm shocked it really isn't mentioned in the article.

It would be like asking for the split of ideologies for people writing articles in "Handgun Today". The very nature of the field implies an ideology.

jiggy20114• 12 years ago

Science should explore new ideas and understandings, but at the same time it should be critical of them. Therefor scientists should be as neutral as possible, but humans are very bad at being neutral. So the counterbalance to that is to try to balance out the biases.

MisterBastahrd• 12 years ago

People interested in furthering human knowledge in the area of social interaction are less inclined to be ideologically inclined to declare that the area of research is a solved problem?

You don't say.

JackFr4• 12 years ago

You're the problem.

fecklessyouth• 12 years ago

The N.Y.U. political psychologist John Jost made the point even more strongly, calling Haidt’s remarks “armchair demography.” Jost wrote, “Haidt fails to grapple meaningfully with the question of why nearly all of the best minds in science find liberal ideas to be closer to the mark with respect to evolution, human nature, mental health, close relationships, intergroup relations, ethics, social justice, conflict resolution, environmental sustainability, and so on.”

A comment meant to combat Haidt's criticism ends up embodying it.

wfo• 12 years ago

There is something to be said for the notion that professors or any public intellectual will bias away from conservatism -- it is the job of a public intellectual in the humanities or social sciences (at least public intellectuals of the past, before non-academics with business degrees took over any and all decision-making in American research institutions) to think critically about and challenge the status quo and the general structure of society, and conservatives almost by definition support the status quo, so it is altogether unsurprising to see fewer conservatives in professorial positions in these disciplines.

However I think here the issue is that the lack of conservatives in social psychology obscures the fact that it is a discipline with almost no real content -- they ask questions and do studies which can provide any result they wish, so the group of people engaged in the science just imprint their own beliefs on it -- getting 'data' and 'studies' that exactly conform with their worldview, not coincidentally. In order to provide basic rigor to the science (and to provide any hope of ending the current replication crisis) there needs to be scientists employing the same methods but who expect radically different (socially conservative) outcomes. Currently the best way to see which method or explanation a psychology study finds evidence for is not to read the study, but rather to read the bio of the first author, and find his or her pet theory. This is the problem at hand. The lack of intellectual diversity in the discipline just allows the intellectual farce to plod along unexposed.

Xcelerate• 12 years ago

Does anyone find it ironic how many downvotes are in this thread? An article about how a majority with a certain viewpoint is biased against a minority with a different viewpoint, and a comments section that's full of people downvoting others whose opinion they personally disagree with.

ArkyBeagle2• 12 years ago

In the early 19th Century, the Unitarians "took over" Harvard from the Congregationalists. Since a great deal of academia is path dependent, academia has had a sort of Progressive bent, seemingly baked into the cake.

( I got this here; I forget which essay it is http://home.earthlink.net/~flyingdragongoddess/indexa.html#p...)

Modern Movement Conservatism isn't very close to the sort of values that academia embraces. It's not even close to what an academic might consider Conservatism ( Burke, Oakeshott ).

A lot of Conservatives come from dealing with regulation and tax codes - that's unlikely to happen to academics.

And I still think Arnold Kling's Three-Axis Model is fantastic. http://www.amazon.com/Three-Languages-Politics-Arnold-Kling-...

aplusbi• 12 years ago

a lack of political diversity that was every bit as dangerous as a lack of, say, racial or religious or gender diversity.

The lack of young-earth creationists in science is very worrisome.

spindritf• 12 years ago

Sure, social scientists are pretty open about their discrimination of conservatives. They admitted it in a survey[1].

The bigger problem is that social science has few correction mechanism. Your biases in computer science will usually be quickly and brutally dealt with by an uncaring computer. Physicists have actual, definitive experiments. Social sciences are seemingly helpless in the face of p-hacking and other bullshittery, even outright fabrications.

Ideological bias of course makes it worse (vide Stapel's paper on racism[2]) but it's not the root cause.

[1] http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/aug/1/liberal-major...

[2] http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110407/full/news.2011.217.ht...

kazinator2• 12 years ago

Your biases in computer science will usually be quickly and brutally dealt with by an uncaring computer.

Unless, of course, you have a monopoly on a large desktop market. Then it will take some time.

DanBC• 12 years ago

Here's an alarming document that shows just how hopelessly bad some of the science is in social psychology.

http://wjh.harvard.edu/~jmitchel/writing/failed_science.htm

There's no hope of spotting or preventing bias if social psychologists are working like that so the fact that many social psychiatrists are "liberal" is going to skew the results of "experiments".

tlogan2• 12 years ago

I don't think this is hard to understand this.

The Republican Party (as of now) is not inclusive. If you are not white, your English is not so great, or your sexual orientation is not heterosexual, or you are traveling and learning about other countries, or you are not born here, or you don't believe in creationism, or your religious views are not Christians then you are out.

And the worst thing is that they don't even notice that. Like ridiculing me about my accent and heritage and then asking "why you are not republican - we have similar views...". Yeah... I have a Trotsky book to sell you.

So if you are in academia you will be excluded by Republican Party because of the following:

- you don't believe in creationism

- your religious views are not Christians

- you are not born here

- you are married with somebody who is not born here

- you are traveling around the world

In short, Republican party is getting defined not by its policy but by its exclusion principle (and it is defined by Fox News - which is not helping Republican party at all).

jiggy20114• 12 years ago

Mitt Romney was not a creationist and he won the Republican nomination in 2012. Based on my understanding you also need to be Christian and born in America to reach the higher positions in either party.

tlogan2• 12 years ago

“I believe that God designed the universe and created the universe,” Mr. Romney said in an interview this week. “And I believe evolution is most likely the process he used to create the human body.” [1]

What to say here?

[1] http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/05/11/romney-elabora...

leesalminen• 12 years ago

Right, because our current president is Christian and was born in America.

omonra• 12 years ago

Your argument falls apart at the second sentence.

The issue discussed is not whether someone is a registered Republican party voter, but the belief structure they have. Imagine that - there are foreign-born non-Christian conservatives who travel around the world.

Whether the rest of your points are true or just bigoted ranting (others may choose) is ultimately irrelevant.

tomohawk• 12 years ago

"Liberals may be more interested in new ideas, more willing to work for peanuts, or just more intelligent"

Nope - no bias to be found here in our neck of the woods!

Turning this around: perhaps conservatives are "more interested in new ideas" and "more intelligent", so they choose to work in other fields?

ldrager• 12 years ago

My comment (also on Reddit).

The problem with our current crop of rightists and science and scholarship (sometimes perceived as "bias") is the "Fox News effect." Scientists and scholars wish to determine and understand reality---and reality has a well known Liberal bias. (Think climate change, evolution, etc., etc.)

I'm willing to listen to anyone, but I am going to judge them by the standards of science and scholarship. If they are not serious about those standards, they are only worth listening to in order to determine the latest right-wing myths.

Note there are certainly people on the left who are not members of the reality based community, but at this moment those on the right are the biggest threat to science and scholarship (I omit political topics) and, in the case of climate change, our lives

jahooma• 12 years ago

Well, there's only one truth. It's perfectly plausible that one set of ideas (conservative ideas) could be less scientific than another set (liberal ideas).

However, ideology can influence us, since we are not perfect at science. Without the strong objective feedback of the hard sciences, social psychology is particularly vulnerable.

The bias alleged in this article actually starts to look more plausible when you consider the history of social psychology and related fields. Back in the 1970s, it was taboo to mention ANY innate qualities of human nature. Gender was purely a social construction. Babies were identical in every way--people were different only because of their upbringing. Prominent biologists like E.O. Wilson who argued genes might play a role were attacked and demonized. Nothing could contradict this doctrine of the blank slate -- that we're born perfectly malleable. I highly recommend Steven Pinker's 2002 book, titled "The Blank Slate" [0] which brilliantly debunks this theory, and lays out the best characterization of human nature I've ever come across. Seriously, read this book, it is a masterpiece.

Anyway, from what I've read recently, it seems many fields like social psychology are still captive to lesser versions of the blank slate fallacy. Human nature is not as malleable as they think. Our instincts are still there (gotta eat, sleep, procreate), and even "higher" areas of the brain for things like language, emotion, and thought seem to be heavily innate (to think at all requires machinery, and there are many ways to craft that machinery). Also, genes really are more important than most seem to realize. The twin and adoption studies show that the majority of variation among people in intelligence and personality is due to genes. How your parents treated you and brought you up has almost no effect by the time you are an adult in important metrics like IQ and personality tests. Smart people are largely born smart.

These sort of "deterministic" ideas fly in the face of traditional liberal values. Topics like gender discrimination and societal inequality are undermined by these ideas, so that provides a reason for a liberal thinker to push back against them.

If the gender gap in computer science is due more to innate differences in interest than to discrimination, and if inequality of income is due more to innate differences in talent than differences in opportunity, then that makes it harder to argue for reform. I believe thinking along these lines is the major cause for bias today.

So yes, I agree social psychology is quite biased. In the future, we will look back with horror at how we let politics and ideology interfere with science.

[0]http://www.amazon.com/The-Blank-Slate-Modern-Denial/dp/01420...

Is Social Psychology Biased Against Republicans?

Related Stories