What if SJWs took over Psychology... oh, Wait.

Came across an interesting article this morning, detailing a new paper which has been published. It deals with lack of diversity in social psychology.  I'll let the excerpt below speak for itself, but consider:

What will happen to social psychology if the upcoming college-age generations- crammed FULL with 'social justice warriors'- begins to take over?

Consider this thought: When you see the chart below, notice that political diversity was vanishing from psychology in the 1930s and 40s.... and recall what Else was going on in the 1930s and 40s.

And how many Died.

CITATION: Duarte, J. L., Crawford, J. T., Stern, C., Haidt, J., Jussim, L., & Tetlock, P. E. (2015). Political diversity will improve social psychological science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 38, 1-13.DOI: dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X14…

ABSTRACT

Psychologists have demonstrated the value of diversity – particularly diversity of viewpoints – for enhancing creativity, discovery, and problem solving. But one key type of viewpoint diversity is lacking in academic psychology in general and social psychology in particular: political diversity. This article reviews the available evidence and finds support for four claims: (1) Academic psychology once had considerable political diversity, but has lost nearly all of it in the last 50 years. (2) This lack of political diversity can undermine the validity of social psychological science via mechanisms such as the embedding of liberal values into research questions and methods, steering researchers away from important but politically unpalatable research topics, and producing conclusions that mischaracterize liberals and conservatives alike. (3) Increased political diversity would improve social psychological science by reducing the impact of bias mechanisms such as confirmation bias, and by empowering dissenting minorities to improve the quality of the majority’s thinking. (4) The underrepresentation of non-liberals in social psychology is most likely due to a combination of self-selection, hostile climate, and discrimination. We close with recommendations for increasing political diversity in social psychology.

 

1. Introduction

In the last few years, social psychology has faced a series of challenges to the validity of its research, including a few high-profile replication failures, a handful of fraud cases, and several articles on questionable research practices and inflated effect sizes… In this article, we suggest that one largely overlooked cause of failure is a lack of political diversity. We review evidence suggesting that political diversity and dissent would improve the reliability and validity of social psychological science…

We focus on conservatives as an underrepresented group because the data on the prevalence in psychology of different ideological groups is best for the liberal-conservative contrast – and the departure from the proportion of liberals and conservatives in the U.S. population is so dramatic. However, we argue that the field needs more non-liberals however they specifically self-identify (e.g., libertarian, moderate)…

The lack of political diversity is not a threat to the validity of specific studies in many and perhaps most areas of research in social psychology. The lack of diversity causes problems for the scientific process primarily in areas related to the political concerns of the Left – areas such as race, gender, stereotyping, environmentalism, power, and inequality – as well as in areas where conservatives themselves are studied, such as in moral and political psychology.

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2. Psychology is less politically diverse than ever

[In this section we review all available information on the political party identification of psychologists, as well as their liberal-conservative self descriptions. The graph below says it all. Whichever of those two measures you use, you find a big change after 1990. Before the 1990s, academic psychology only LEANED left. Liberals and Democrats outnumbered Conservatives and Republican by 4 to 1 or less. But as the “greatest generation” retired in the 1990s and was replaced by baby boomers, the ratio skyrocketed to something more like 12 to 1. In just 20 years. Few psychologists realize just how quickly or completely the field has become a political monoculture. This graph took us by surprise too.]

Figure 1. The political party and ideological sympathies of academic psychologists have shifted leftward over time. Circles show ratios of self-reports of liberal vs. conservative. Diamonds show ratios of self-reports of party preference or voting (Democrat vs. Republican). Data for 1924–60 is reported in McClintock et al. (1965). Open diamonds are participants’ recollections of whom they voted for; gray diamonds are self-reported party identification at time of the survey. Data for 1999 is reported in Rothman et al. (2005). Data from 2006 is reported in Gross and Simmons (2007). The right-most circle is from Inbar and Lammers (2012) and is the ratio of selfidentified liberal/conservative social psychologists.

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3. Three ways that the lack of diversity undermines social psychology

Might a shared moral-historical narrative [the “liberal progress” narrative described by sociologist Christian Smith] in a politically homogeneous field undermine the self-correction processes on which good science depends? We think so, and present three risk points— three ways in which political homogeneity can threaten the validity of social psychological science—and examples from the extant literature illustrating each point.

3.1. Risk point 1: Liberal values and assumptions can become embedded into theory and method

The embedding of values occurs when value statements or ideological claims are wrongly treated as objective truth, and observed deviation from that truth is treated as error.

[Example:] Son Hing, Bobocel, Zanna, and McBride (2007) found that: 1) people high in social dominance orientation (SDO) were more likely to make unethical decisions, 2) people high in right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) were more likely to go along with the unethical decisions of leaders, and 3) dyads with high SDO leaders and high RWA followers made more unethical decisions than dyads with alternative arrangements (e.g., low SDO—low RWA dyads).

Yet consider the decisions they defined as unethical: not formally taking a female colleague’s side in her sexual harassment complaint against her subordinate (given little information about the case), and a worker placing the well-being of his or her company above unspecified harms to the environment attributed to the company’s operations. Liberal values of feminism and environmentalism were embedded directly into the operationalization of ethics, even to the extent that participants were expected to endorse those values in vignettes that lacked the information one would need to make a considered judgment.

The appearance of certain words that imply pernicious motives (e.g., deny, legitimize, rationalize, justify, defend, trivialize) may be particularly indicative of research tainted by embedded values.

3.2. Risk point 2: Researchers may concentrate on topics that validate the liberal progress narrative and avoid topics that contest that narrative

Since the enlightenment, scientists have thought of themselves as spreading light and pushing back the darkness. The metaphor is apt, but in a politically homogeneous field, a larger-than-optimal number of scientists shine their flashlights on ideologically important regions of the terrain. Doing so leaves many areas unexplored. Even worse, some areas become walled off, and inquisitive researchers risk ostracism if they venture in.

[Example:] Stereotype accuracy. Since the 1930s, social psychologists have been proclaiming the inaccuracy of social stereotypes, despite lacking evidence of such inaccuracy. Evidence has seemed unnecessary because stereotypes have been, in effect, stereotyped as inherently nasty and inaccurate (see Jussim, 2012a for a review).

Some group stereotypes are indeed hopelessly crude and untestable. But some may rest on valid empiricism—and represent subjective estimates of population characteristics (e.g. the proportion of people who drop out of high school, are victims of crime, or endorse policies that support women at work, see Jussim, 2012a, Ryan, 2002 for reviews). In this context, it is not surprising that the rigorous empirical study of the accuracy of factual stereotypes was initiated by one of the very few self-avowed conservatives in social psychology—Clark McCauley (McCauley & Stitt, 1978). Since then, dozens of studies by independent researchers have yielded evidence that stereotype accuracy (of all sorts of stereotypes) is one of the most robust effects in all of social psychology (Jussim, 2012a). Here is a clear example of the value of political diversity: a conservative social psychologist asked a question nobody else thought (or dared) to ask, and found results that continue to make many social psychologists uncomfortable. McCauley’s willingness to put the assumption of stereotype inaccuracy to an empirical test led to the correction of one of social psychology’s most longstanding errors.

3.3. Risk point 3: Negative attitudes regarding conservatives can produce a psychological science that mischaracterizes their traits and attributes

A long-standing view in social-political psychology is that the right is more dogmatic and intolerant of ambiguity than the left, a view Tetlock (1983) dubbed the rigidity-of-the-right hypothesis…. But had social psychologists studied a broad enough range of situations to justify these broad conclusions? Recent evidence suggests not. The ideologically objectionable premise model (IOPM; Crawford, 2012) posits that people on the political left and right are equally likely to approach political judgments with their ideological blinders on. That said, they will only do so when the premise of a political judgment is ideologically acceptable. If it’s objectionable, any preferences for one group over another will be short-circuited, and biases won’t emerge. The IOPM thus allows for biases to emerge only among liberals, only among conservatives, or among both liberals and conservatives, depending on the situation. For example, reinterpreting Altemeyer’s mandatory school prayer results, Crawford (2012) argued that for people low in RWA who value individual freedom and autonomy, mandatory school prayer is objectionable; thus, the very nature of the judgment should shut off any biases in favor of one target over the other. However, for people high in RWA who value society-wide conformity to traditional morals and values, mandating school prayer is acceptable; this acceptable premise then allows for people high in RWA to express a bias in favor of Christian over Muslim school prayer. Crawford (2012, Study 1) replaced mandatory prayer with voluntary prayer, which would be acceptable to both people high and low in RWA. In line with the IOPM, people high in RWA were still biased in favor of Christian over Muslim prayer, while people low in RWA now showed a bias in favor of Muslim over Christian voluntary prayer. Hypocrisy is therefore not necessarily a special province of the right.

These example illustrate the threats to truth-seeking that emerge when members of a politically homogenous intellectual community are motivated to cast their perceived outgroup (i.e., the ones who violate the liberal progressive narrative) in a negative light. If there were more social psychologists who were motivated to question the design and interpretation of studies biased towards liberal values during peer review, or if there were more researchers running their own studies using different methods, social psychologists could be more confident in the validity of their characterizations of conservatives (and liberals).

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4. Why political diversity is likely to improve social psychological science

Diversity can be operationalized in many ways, including demographic diversity (e.g., ethnicity, race, and gender) and viewpoint diversity (e.g., variation in intellectual viewpoints or professional expertise). Research in organizational psychology suggest that: a) the benefits of viewpoint diversity are more consistent and pronounced than those of demographic diversity (Menz, 2012; Williams & O’Reilly, 1998); and b) the benefits of viewpoint diversity are most pronounced when organizations are pursuing open-ended exploratory goals (e.g., scientific discovery) as opposed to exploitative goals (e.g., applying well-established routines to well-defined problems; Cannella, Park & Hu, 2008). Viewpoint diversity may therefore be more valuable than demographic diversity if social psychology’s core goal is to produce broadly valid and generalizable conclusions. (Of course, demographic diversity can bring viewpoint diversity, but if it is viewpoint diversity that is wanted, then it may be more effective to pursue it directly.) It is the lack of political viewpoint diversity that makes social psychology vulnerable to the three risks described in the previous section. Political diversity is likely to have a variety of positive effects by reducing the impact of two familiar mechanisms that we explore below: confirmation bias and groupthink/majority consensus.

4.1. Confirmation bias

People tend to search for evidence that will confirm their existing beliefs while also ignoring or downplaying disconfirming evidence. This confirmation bias (Nickerson, 1998) is widespread among both laypeople and scientists (Ioannidis, 2012). Confirmation bias can become even stronger when people confront questions that trigger moral emotions and concerns about group identity (Haidt, 2001; 2012). Further, group-polarization often exacerbates extremism in echo chambers (Lamm & Myers, 1978). [and note from the graph above that social psychology has become an echo chamber since the 1990s] Indeed, people are far better at identifying the flaws in other people’s evidence-gathering than in their own, especially if those other people have dissimilar beliefs (e.g., Mercier & Sperber, 2011; Sperber et al., 2010). Although such processes may be beneficial for communities whose goal is social cohesion (e.g., a religious or activist movement), they can be devastating for scientific communities by leading to widely-accepted claims that reflect the scientific community’s blind spots more than they reflect justified scientific conclusions (see, e.g., the three risk points discussed previously).

The most obvious cure for this problem is to increase the viewpoint diversity of the field. Nobody has found a way to eradicate confirmation bias in individuals (Lilienfeld et al., 2009), but we can diversify the field to the point where individual viewpoint biases begin to cancel each other out.

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Read the rest Here heterodoxacademy.org/2015/09/1…

I am becoming increasingly wary of what the future may bring. Just look at the demonization of climate skeptics, of energy ('big oil conspiracy!' Feh), and some try to drag the Jews into all of it........

*edit* 'liberal values of feminism and environmentalism' - interesting phrase, in light of all the environmental destruction which is being wrought due to leftist environmental thinking. Forests clear-cut for wind farms or biomass burning; rubber-tire reefs now disintegrating and killing dolphins among other problems; orangutans on the brink of extinction in at least one region due to clear-cutting for biofuels.....