I have a good friend who is fairly liberal who when we first became friends accused me of being biased rightward because I read conservative journals like National Review. In what I consider to be my best comeback of all time I pointed out that I also read Time, Business Week, listened to NPR, watched PBS, CBS, CNN, NBC, ABC, the movies and attended college taught almost exclusively by liberals and so wherever my views came from they didn't come from a lack of perspective on what the other side was thinking. As I said it was a sweet comeback, never to be surpassed, mostly because my friend is sharp character who learned very quickly to keep his ideological hands close in to defend against that particular roundhouse.
I was reminded of that exchange by an article in the New Yorker on Jonathan Haidt - the Virginia social scientist - and his quest to understand political bias in the field of Social Psychology.
On January 27, 2011, from a stage in the middle of the San Antonio Convention Center, Jonathan Haidt addressed the participants of the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. The topic was an ambitious one: a vision for social psychology in the year 2020. Haidt began by reviewing the field that he is best known for, moral psychology. Then he threw a curveball. He would, he told the gathering of about a thousand social-psychology professors, students, and post-docs, like some audience participation. By a show of hands, how would those present describe their political orientation? First came the liberals: a “sea of hands,” comprising about eighty per cent of the room, Haidt later recalled. Next, the centrists or moderates. Twenty hands. Next, the libertarians. Twelve hands. And last, the conservatives. Three hands.
Social psychology, Haidt went on, had an obvious problem: a lack of political diversity that was every bit as dangerous as a lack of, say, racial or religious or gender diversity. It discouraged conservative students from joining the field, and it discouraged conservative members from pursuing certain lines of argument. It also introduced bias into research questions, methodology, and, ultimately, publications. The topics that social psychologists chose to study and how they chose to study them, he argued, suffered from homogeneity. The effect was limited, Haidt was quick to point out, to areas that concerned political ideology and politicized notions, like race, gender, stereotyping, and power and inequality. “It’s not like the whole field is undercut, but when it comes to research on controversial topics, the effect is most pronounced,” he later told me. (Haidt has now put his remarks in more formal terms, complete with data, in a paper forthcoming this winter in Behavioral and Brain Sciences.)
And the article goes on to note that skewed politics has been found to result in actual bias.
A year after Haidt’s lecture, the Tilburg University psychologists Yoel Inbar and Joris Lammers published the results of a series of surveys conducted with approximately eight hundred social psychologists—all members of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. In the first survey, they repeated a more detailed version of Haidt’s query: How did the participants self-identify politically? The question, however, was asked separately regarding social, economic, and foreign-policy issues. Haidt, they found, was both wrong and right. Yes, the vast majority of respondents reported themselves to be liberal in all three areas. 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.
When Inbar and Lammers contacted S.P.S.P. members a second time, six months later, they found that the second element of Haidt’s assertion—that the climate in social psychology was harsh for conservative thinkers—was on point. This time, after revealing their general political leanings, the participants were asked about the environment in the field: How hostile did they think it was? Did they feel free to express their political ideas? As the degree of conservatism rose, so, too, did the hostility that people experienced. Conservatives really were significantly more afraid to speak out. Meanwhile, the liberals thought that tolerance was high for everyone. The more liberal they were, the less they thought discrimination of any sort would take place.
As a final step, the team asked each person a series of questions to see how willing she would personally be to do something that could be considered discrimination against a conservative. Here, an interesting disconnect emerged between self-perception—does my field discriminate?—and theoretical responses about behaviors. Over all, close to nineteen per cent reported that they would have a bias against a conservative-leaning paper; twenty-four per cent, against a conservative-leaning grant application; fourteen per cent, against inviting a conservative to a symposium; and thirty-seven and a half per cent, against choosing a conservative as a future colleague. They persisted in saying that no discrimination existed, yet their theoretical behaviors belied that idealized reality.'
But the more interesting topic is not that there's bias, of course there is! It's what the impact of systematic intellectual bias not only in social psychology but across all of the social sciences and humanities has on what we know to be so. Because if these areas of academe are biased heavily leftward then what we know must heavily skewed as well. For example if historians are largely leftists and if we get our history from school books that are biased, college books that are biased, best sellers and well reviewed books that are biased then we know that on average, we're getting a seriously biased view of what has happened in the past. And the bias isn't just about the interpretation of events it's about which events matter, which events exist, which social movements are known and which are forgotten. It's about whether the emphasis is on things like 'justice' or 'wealth' or 'faith' or 'racism' or 'liberty'. It's about which narratives gets made into documentaries, films, TV shows, talk shows and so on. Systematic bias with heavily skewed ideological priors has a significant influences on our identities, who we conceive ourselves to be.
And since we know that all of these intellectual fields are to one degree or another heavily skewed leftward we must acknowledge that what we collectively know and believe to be true is biased to the left. Left topics, left research designs, left hypotheses, left conclusions, left papers that respond to left objections published in left journals and ranked by left readers as to their (left) significance, highlighted by left journalists on left websites and written about in left books and so on and so forth ad leftinintum.
So if you knew all this and you were trying to honestly interpret reality or even find truth with a capital T in your life what would you need to do?
Discount left narratives and conclusions?
Search out right narratives and conclusions and give them more credence?
Recognize that your perspective as a leftist is far more likely to be biased than that of a similarly positioned rightist?
And who do you think is more likely to be mugged by reality - someone who's marinated in one view of reality their whole lives or someone who has been forced by the culture to contront an alternative narrative and then work out what they believe without frankly much guidance, indeed opposition from the 'great and the good'. Who's likely to have stronger, better founded beliefs? Those who go along with what everyone else believes or those who have had to reason to a an answer in the face of derison and hostility?
I'm betting right wingers have a much better grasp of reality. And indeed public affairs knowledge polling tends to show that Republicans and Cinservatived have a consistent if modest knowledge advantage over Democrats with the same educational levels. That probably understates the advantage because pollsters like Pew only focuses on the most important issues and of course are left institutions asking left friendly questions. The looking glass world of intellectual bias is so deep with so many layers that it will hide the intellectual strengths that both the rank and file and intellectual libertarian right has. What that means for our politics is any one's guess.
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