NY Times: Liberals dominate social psychology and other academic topics

[alp227]

The NY Times reports "Social Scientist Sees Bias Within":

Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia who studies the intuitive foundations of morality and ideology...polled his audience at the San Antonio Convention Center, starting by asking how many considered themselves politically liberal. A sea of hands appeared, and Dr. Haidt estimated that liberals made up 80 percent of the 1,000 psychologists in the ballroom. When he asked for centrists and libertarians, he spotted fewer than three dozen hands. And then, when he asked for conservatives, he counted a grand total of three.

“This is a statistically impossible lack of diversity,” Dr. Haidt concluded, noting polls showing that 40 percent of Americans are conservative and 20 percent are liberal. In his speech and in an interview, Dr. Haidt argued that social psychologists are a “tribal-moral community” united by “sacred values” that hinder research and damage their credibility — and blind them to the hostile climate they’ve created for non-liberals.

The politics of the professoriate has been studied by the economists Christopher Cardiff and Daniel Klein and the sociologists Neil Gross and Solon Simmons. They’ve independently found that Democrats typically outnumber Republicans at elite universities by at least six to one among the general faculty, and by higher ratios in the humanities and social sciences. In a 2007 study of both elite and non-elite universities, Dr. Gross and Dr. Simmons reported that nearly 80 percent of psychology professors are Democrats, outnumbering Republicans by nearly 12 to 1.

The fields of psychology, sociology and anthropology have long attracted liberals, but they became more exclusive after the 1960s, according to Dr. Haidt. “The fight for civil rights and against racism became the sacred cause unifying the left throughout American society, and within the academy,” he said, arguing that this shared morality both “binds and blinds.”

So does reality have a liberal bias because it really does or because the reality sayers just say so to counter Fox News?

Dr. Haidt also addressed the issue of former Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan addressing issues affecting black people during the 1960s:

...academics can be selective, too, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan found in 1965 when he warned about the rise of unmarried parenthood and welfare dependency among blacks — violating the taboo against criticizing victims of racism.

“Moynihan was shunned by many of his colleagues at Harvard as racist,” Dr. Haidt said. “Open-minded inquiry into the problems of the black family was shut down for decades, precisely the decades in which it was most urgently needed. Only in the last few years have liberal sociologists begun to acknowledge that Moynihan was right all along.”

[bluestateguy]

1. So what?

Take a trip down to any university business school and you'll be hard pressed to find a liberal professor.

Various professions attract persons of certain political mindsets. Visit an Officers Club in the Army or Marines and you'll be hard pressed to find a liberal among them.

[EFerrari]

2. This guy sounds like one of those wingnuts that spread bad numbers

and worse conclusions.

[immoderate]

3. The conservative approach to social psychology is to lower taxes on the rich.

Those fuckers are nothing if not consistent.

--imm

[PDJane]

4. That's as much a result of the studies

as anything else. How do you manage to read the philosophers, psychiatry, the arts, and remain conservative? It takes an ability to ignore the ideals of what you are studying.

[JDPriestly]

9. Just one example, who can read Voltaire and remain conservative?

Impossible. Even a relatively conservative philosopher like Pascal would change a conservative to a liberal.

And, I read virtually everything Ayn Rand wrote. Her philosophy does not work at the level of the family. Once you really fall in love, once, for example, you have to care for someone you love who is ill or injured, you realize that her ideas do not work in your life.

Conservatism is, as far as I am concerned, a rather self-centered, neurotic attitude.

[DonCoquixote]

10. The best quote on ayn rand

"our philosophy is just Ayn Rand with trappings" Anton Lovey, church of Satan.

[sea four]

5. Because conservatives have a warped sense of reality...

which gets fixed by learning more.

Plenty of those people were right-leaning when they graduated high school. But it changed when they learned more about how things really work.

Social sciences give MUCH better explanations for things than Glen Beck and Rush Limbaugh do.

You'd have to be a real moron to remain conservative after getting a PHD in social psychology. Conservative beliefs just don't match up with reality.

That is the reason this happens.

[Hardrada]

6. WE should probably have more Nazi Social Psychologists, I guess.

[Hello_Kitty]

7. And conservatives dominate in Econ departments and B schools

No one seems alarmed by that.

[alp227]

11. I think because of conservatives' free-market advocacy

which is why The Wall Street Journal, Investor's Business Daily, Forbes and other business publications may have a right-wing slant. Heck, conservatives write authoritative econ books (Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell, and Bush's econ adviser Greg Mankiw Principles of Economics as examples). Thus conservatives end up dominating the economic message. Similarly, liberals are more supportive of science in general than conservatives so that's why you see liberals dominating climate science and anthropology as conservatives influenced by religion and whatnot would rather stay away.

[Hello_Kitty]

12. True, but no one frets about the conservative influence in economics

As they do over liberal influence in other fields.

[highplainsdem]

8. Jonathan Haidt is a wingnut. As an example of how little objectivity he maintains:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703673604575550243700895762.html

OCTOBER 16, 2010

What the Tea Partiers Really Want

-snip-

Because a generalized love of liberty doesn't distinguish tea partiers from other Americans, liberals have been free to speculate on the "real" motives behind the movement. Explanations so far have spanned a rather narrow range, from racism (they're all white!) to greed (they just don't want to pay taxes!) to gullibility (Glenn Beck has hypnotized them!). Such explanations allow liberals to disregard the moral claims of tea partiers. But the passion of the tea-party movement is, in fact, a moral passion. It can be summarized in one word: not liberty, but karma.

-snip-

To understand the anger of the tea-party movement, just imagine how you would feel if you learned that government physicists were building a particle accelerator that might, as a side effect of its experiments, nullify the law of gravity. Everything around us would float away, and the Earth itself would break apart. Now, instead of that scenario, suppose you learned that politicians were devising policies that might, as a side effect of their enactment, nullify the law of karma. Bad deeds would no longer lead to bad outcomes, and the fragile moral order of our nation would break apart. For tea partiers, this scenario is not science fiction. It is the last 80 years of American history.

In the tea partiers' scheme of things, the federal government got into the business of protecting the American people—from market fluctuations as well as from their own bad decisions—under Franklin D. Roosevelt. During the Great Depression, most Americans recognized that capitalism required safety nets here and there. But Lyndon Johnson's effort to build the Great Society, and particularly welfare programs that reduced the incentives for work and marriage among the poor, went much further.

-snip-

There's a graph there with three of the most unintentionally hilarious questions I've ever seen included in a survey, questions which supposedly test how "moral" the respondents are, with liberals and libertarians being fairly close in their responses, and conservatives supposedly being more moral.

The questions asked people, "How much would someone have to pay you to do each of the following things? Assume nothing bad would happen to you afterward and you cannot use the money to make up for your action."

The first test situation, supposedly testing "loyalty," was how much they'd have to be paid to "Say something bad about your nation (which you don't believe to be true) while calling in, anonymously, to a talk-radio show in a foreign nation."

The test situation for "authority" was "Slap your father in the face (with his permission) as part of a comedy skit."

And the test situation for "sanctity" was "Get a blood transfusion of 1 pint of disease-free, compatible blood from a convicted child molester." Haidt explains in this WSJ article that "Sanctity refers to the belief that things have invisible spiritual essences—the body is a temple, the flag is far more than a piece of cloth, etc."

FWIW, all three groups -- liberals, libertarians, and conservatives -- were apparently willing to do these things for a certain amount of money.

The conservatives wanted more money. That was the one clear result.

You could chalk this up to their superior values, or you could consider what role hypocrisy and greed might have played in the answers.

The questions themselves show a really odd mindset. The idea that somehow being reluctant to slap your father in a comedy skit he's also in, where he wants you to slap him -- just acting, a slap that wouldn't hurt -- would actually show your response to or respect for "authority" is absurd. It would show, if anything, irrational fear of appearing to challenge "authority" even when it's an act. By saying this is happening only in a comedy skit and it's what the father wants, the researchers totally undercut the relevance of this question and muddled any conclusions that could be drawn from the answers.

The question about an anonymous call to a radio show is actually more of a test of how important someone thinks talk radio is. You'd expect conservatives to score higher.

And I can't imagine why Haidt and his colleagues thought the blood-transfusion question somehow addressed the idea of "sanctity" -- or why they thought that was such an important question. Assuming the respondents believed the blood transfusion was absolutely necessary in an emergency, a reluctance to accept it would be more likely to show irrational fear than anything else.

So, basically, they tested irrational fear with two questions, and respect for talk radio with another.

By the way, the graph suggests that libertarians were even less concerned about these test situations than liberals were. Just a bit less, but they scored lower on all three questions, on average saying they'd want less money to do those things.

And that, more than anything else, indicates that these are NOT the major factors in why people join the Tea Party. Haidt glosses over that little problem, in his paean to the alleged morality of the Tea Party.

And that lack of logic, plus the really odd choice of questions and the weight given to them, left me skeptical of any analysis Haidt would ever do.

[Bandit]

13. This quote seems to capture the tea bagger mentality completely

"Bad deeds would no longer lead to bad outcomes, and the fragile moral order of our nation would break apart. For tea partiers, this scenario is not science fiction. It is the last 80 years of American history."
That is why they shrug their shoulders when someone mentions torture. They no longer care about right and wrong because they don't recognize any consequences.. They know they will not "go to hell" and they probably will benefit from their misdeeds.