April 2011
SAN
ANTONIO — Some of the world’s pre-eminent experts on bias discovered an
unexpected form of it at their annual meeting.
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.”
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.”
“If
a group circles around sacred values, they will evolve into a tribal-moral
community,” he said. “They’ll embrace science whenever it supports their sacred
values, but they’ll ditch it or distort it as soon as it threatens a sacred
value.” It’s easy for social scientists to observe this process in other
communities, like the fundamentalist Christians who embrace “intelligent design”
while rejecting Darwinism. But 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.”
Similarly, Larry Summers, then president of Harvard, was ostracized in 2005 for
wondering publicly whether the preponderance of male professors in some top math
and science departments might be due partly to the larger variance in I.Q.
scores among men (meaning there are more men at the very high and very low
ends). “This was not a permissible hypothesis,” Dr. Haidt said. “It blamed the
victims rather than the powerful. The outrage ultimately led to his resignation.
We psychologists should have been outraged by the outrage. We should have
defended his right to think freely.”
Instead, the taboo against discussing sex differences was reinforced, so
universities and the National Science Foundation went on spending tens of
millions of dollars on research and programs based on the assumption that female
scientists faced discrimination and various forms of unconscious bias. But that
assumption has been repeatedly contradicted, most recently in a study published
Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by two
Cornell
psychologists, Stephen J. Ceci and Wendy M. Williams. After reviewing two
decades of research, they report that a woman in academic science typically
fares as well as, if not better than, a comparable man when it comes to being
interviewed, hired, promoted, financed and published.
“Thus,” they conclude, “the ongoing focus on sex discrimination in reviewing,
interviewing and hiring represents costly, misplaced effort. Society is engaged
in the present in solving problems of the past.” Instead of presuming
discrimination in science or expecting the sexes to show equal interest in every
discipline, the Cornell researchers say, universities should make it easier for
women in any field to combine scholarship with family responsibilities.
Can
social scientists open up to outsiders’ ideas? Dr. Haidt was optimistic enough
to title his speech “The Bright Future of Post-Partisan Social Psychology,”
urging his colleagues to focus on shared science rather than shared moral
values. To overcome taboos, he advised them to subscribe to National Review
and to read Thomas Sowell’s “A Conflict of Visions.”
For
a tribal-moral community, the social psychologists in Dr. Haidt’s audience
seemed refreshingly receptive to his argument. Some said he overstated how
liberal the field is, but many agreed it should welcome more ideological
diversity. A few even endorsed his call for a new affirmative-action goal: a
membership that’s 10 percent conservative by 2020. The society’s executive
committee didn’t endorse Dr. Haidt’s numerical goal, but it did vote to put a
statement on the group’s home page welcoming psychologists with “diverse
perspectives.” It also made a change on the “Diversity Initiatives” page — a
two-letter correction of what it called a grammatical glitch, although others
might see it as more of a Freudian slip.
In
the old version, the society announced that special funds to pay for travel to
the annual meeting were available to students belonging to “underrepresented
groups (i.e., ethnic or racial minorities, first-generation college students,
individuals with a physical disability, and/or lesbian, gay, bisexual, or
transgendered students).”
As
Dr. Haidt noted in his speech, the “i.e.” implied that this was the exclusive,
sacred list of “underrepresented groups.” The society took his suggestion to
substitute “e.g.” — a change that leaves it open to other groups, too. Maybe,
someday, even to conservatives.
New York Times, February 7, 2011.
Correction: February 7, 2011
Help us maintain freedom in teaching, research and scholarship by joining SAFS or making a donation.
