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The Tower Leans Left
Fresh from the Department of Duh --
Social Scientist Sees Bias Within By JOHN TIERNEY Published: February 7, 2011 SAN ANTONIO — Some of the world’s pre-eminent experts on bias discovered an unexpected form of it at their annual meeting. You can get a personalized answer by filling out a short questionnaire at Your Morals, a research project of Jonathan Haidt, the subject of this Findings column, and six other social psychologists. Discrimination is always high on the agenda at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology’s conference, where psychologists discuss their research on racial prejudice, homophobia, sexism, stereotype threat and unconscious bias against minorities. But the most talked-about speech at this year’s meeting, which ended Jan. 30, involved a new “outgroup.” It was identified by Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia who studies the intuitive foundations of morality and ideology. He polled his audience at the San Antonio Convention Center, starting by asking how many considered themselves politically liberal. A sea of hands appeared, and Dr. Haidt estimated that liberals made up 80 percent of the 1,000 psychologists in the ballroom. When he asked for centrists and libertarians, he spotted fewer than three dozen hands. And then, when he asked for conservatives, he counted a grand total of three. “This is a statistically impossible lack of diversity,” Dr. Haidt concluded, noting polls showing that 40 percent of Americans are conservative and 20 percent are liberal. In his speech and in an interview, Dr. Haidt argued that social psychologists are a “tribal-moral community” united by “sacred values” that hinder research and damage their credibility — and blind them to the hostile climate they’ve created for non-liberals. “Anywhere in the world that social psychologists see women or minorities underrepresented by a factor of two or three, our minds jump to discrimination as the explanation,” said Dr. Haidt, who called himself a longtime liberal turned centrist. “But when we find out that conservatives are underrepresented among us by a factor of more than 100, suddenly everyone finds it quite easy to generate alternate explanations.” Dr. Haidt (pronounced height) told the audience that he had been corresponding with a couple of non-liberal graduate students in social psychology whose experiences reminded him of closeted gay students in the 1980s. He quoted — anonymously — from their e-mails describing how they hid their feelings when colleagues made political small talk and jokes predicated on the assumption that everyone was a liberal. “I consider myself very middle-of-the-road politically: a social liberal but fiscal conservative. Nonetheless, I avoid the topic of politics around work,” one student wrote. “Given what I’ve read of the literature, I am certain any research I conducted in political psychology would provide contrary findings and, therefore, go unpublished. Although I think I could make a substantial contribution to the knowledge base, and would be excited to do so, I will not.” more at: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/08/science/08tier.html?_r=4&src=me&ref=homepage |
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Of course, the other answer is that Haidt is just like all the other liberal social psychologists in seeing distributions of traits inside or outside the academy as a result of bias. Maybe patterns of traits both inside and outside the academy are influenced by factors other than bias.
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#3
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Nothing new, academia is more left leaning than anything else. However it is researchers' responsibility to completely eliminate every variable in their studies, that is the nature of research. Researcher bias is one of the top things that any quantitative researcher needs to eliminate before publishing. The fact that this is a NY times article is actually rather embarrassing.
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#4
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i read that piece last tuesday. typical don quixote -oops - i mean tierney, seeing more than just windmills. thanks, sancho, for posting this claptrap; the irony of an ideologue like tierney accusing others of ideological bias and discrimination is rich.
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