The top article in yesterday’s NYT list of popular articles was one titled “Social Scientist Sees Bias Within“. After last year’s WEIRD paper, I was curious what new bias had been uncovered. The scientist referred to in the title is Jonathan Haidt, another psychologist with fascinating perspectives and ideas (I’ve written about his work before). The bias is the almost complete lack of political conservatives (American conservatives, more precisely) in the field of social psychology (social psychology is the study of relations between people and groups).
Haidt’s talk is quite fascinating and he’s an excellent communicator. He has recently been working on the biological and cultural underpinnings of our morality. He says that morality binds and blinds. The blinding happens as a consequence of holding certain ideas as sacred, ideas that cannot be questioned or attacked. This is no different than a religion. Science and the pursuit of truth cannot but be harmed when this happens. In such an environment, certain hypotheses can never be formulated because they question the unquestionable. As a consequence, the field is stuck in a rut, unable to develop a more predictable representation of reality.
Haidt says that social psychology has come to be dominated by political progressives. When he does a show of hands at the talk, out of an audience of about 1000 or so, 80-90% openly state that they’re liberal while only three people say that they’re politically conservative. Haidt says that when it comes to studies such as those involving differences due to race or gender, the ideas held sacred by the political progressives prevents a full exploration of the problem. He illustrates the danger in this by pointing out three examples, one of which is the consequences of the infamous Moynihan Report.
When Patrick Moynihan, the then Assistant Secretary of Labor to Lyndon Johnson and a political liberal, published a report about a study of the African-American family that concluded: “that the structure of family life in the black community constituted a ‘tangle of pathology…capable of perpetuating itself without assistance from the white world,’ and that ‘at the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of Negro society is the deterioration of the Negro family. It is the fundamental source of the weakness of the Negro community at the present time.” The political firestorm that erupted prevented any honest discussion of this real problem at a time when it could’ve made a huge difference, according to Haidt. Even though Moynihan’s intent was to help the black man, the outcry over the words and the conclusion about the black family, prevented any real work, and as a consequence, what he prophesied in the report about the black family came to pass.
Haidt also talks of how the current climate creates a hostile environment for politically conservative social psychology students. One such student wrote to him: “Given what I’ve read of the literature, I am certain any research I conducted in political psychology would provide contrary findings and, therefore, go unpublished. Although I think I could make a substantial contribution to the knowledge base, and would be excited to do so, I will not.”
Haidt’s talk is titled “The Bright Future of Post-Partisan Psychology” and can be listened to in complete, with the slides, online.
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