Shocking news from the frontlines of the anti-discrimination battles.
Liberals — particularly in academia and the social sciences — have a tribal mentality which results in discrimination against conservatives.
What is shocking is not that such tribal mentality exists, but that anyone is expressing surprise.
As reported by The New York Times, for which this really is shocking news, someone just discovered this reality (emphasis mine):
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.”
Conservatives are the new “outgroup.” No actually, we are the old outgroup. It’s just that the real ingroup has convinced itself that it is the outgroup in order to keep out the real outgroup. Get it?
Regardless of whether I’m part of the new or old outgroup, can I get money for that? After all, isn’t that what the discrimination business is all about?
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Comments
Who are social psychologists, and what, exactly, is their function?
No. Wait. Never mind. I've made it this far in life without knowing they exist…I suppose I can live out the rest of it in similar blissful ignorance.
I call for reparations. Whatever blacks plan on getting per person, double it.
Greedy capitalist pig
We need an acronym. We'll never be recognized as an official Victim Group without an acronym.
And then we need our own XXX Studies departments in all universities.
"I call for reparations. Whatever blacks plan on getting per person, double it."
I say we also lobby for affirmative action.
"“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."
Dr. Haidt obviously has no concept of how statistics work. You can't take stats from a general population and assume they even remotely apply to a tiny subset. It's like polling people in New Hampshire and being shocked (shocked!) I tell you to find they are ethnically skewed from the overall world or even US population.
"It's just that the real ingroup has convinced itself that it is the outgroup in order to keep out the real outgroup. Get it?"
Well, almost: It's just that the real outgroup has convinced the real ingroup that it is the outgroup in order to keep out the real ingroup. Get it? And the real ingroup has been lazy, even timid, regarding its dignity. So who's to blame for the world turned topsy-turvy? Rhetorical question. Answer: not the real outgroup.
This is hilarious. So can we conservatives now claim victim group status? Can we start playing the conservative card?
@Tlaloc, I think that you miss the whole point of the observation that Dr. Haidt was making and it has nothing to do with the unscientific message of his observation:
“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.”
The field of social psychologists is being dominated by those who consider themselves to be liberals. This of course has a lot to do with their education (and lack of general maturity). It also means that their research is being dominated by their liberal biases which in turn means that they are jumping to wrong conclusions on a number of subjects.
The money part of his quote is that he said that their tribal mentality hinders research and damages credibility.
Actually, he is absolutely correct. The outright dominace of liberals in the field of social psychology means that there is a lack of credibility for the outcome of their research.
Fear societies, heavy and light http://bit.ly/8KsnS
It's interesting that, every once in a while, the NYT can still print something worth reading.
@Tlaloc: I think Haidt's point is that generally speaking, global stats are difficult at best to relate to a small group. (It can be done – one just has to use the right methodology and sample size). He is saying that to assume that the only explanation for an underrepresentation is some kind of discriminatory practice is absurd.
He is correct.
Bat crap. The "social psychologists" have self-selected for liberalism and are very comfy with that state of affairs.
Until reality hits them "upside the biscuit-trap" and it is discovered by the anointed that liberalism is not a viable survival strategy sans money from conservative taxpayers.
'Diversity' and 'multiculturalism' are constructs tailored to further the goals of victimhood – that is, perpetual dissatisfaction with 'things' both real and imagined ('unconscious bias', underrepresentation, etc).
It is a world where small numbers automatically = victim.
These 'new-age' concepts prevent identified 'groups' from assimilating into a larger group many of us would prefer as an identity, that is, of 'Americans' and not of these smaller tribal and deliberately segregated subgroups.
It is the formula for divide and conquer played so brilliantly by the left in order to fulfill their own cynical worldview where big government is the solution to all perceived inequities.
All men are born 'equal'; however, their outcomes and the choices they make as a result of God-given freedom are not. That is by design.
This is the major misunderstanding the left is guilty of as they struggle to give order to our world. Trying to understand the world through human formulations is destined to end in frustration.
The arrogance of man is severely underrated!
Well, since this insight comes from a field whose practitioners are so biased liberals can safely ignore it and go on to business as usual which is how can they get rid of those three hardcore conservatives?
I'm a psychologist and know exactly what it's like to be the odd duck in a room full of 1000 bleeding heart liberals. It makes me want to vomit most of the time. The bias is real and hugely influential on the "scientific agenda." Tell them you're a gun owner and you might as well have leprosy, AIDS, and cancer.
When do we start the forced integration?
It is amazing that this man stood up and presented this truth to the crowd. Still more amazing is that he has seen it for what it is, called it what it is, and seems to be telling the Leftists that they need to do something about it.
How about universities? How does his data relate to professors and university staff? I believe it would be quite similar to his statistics and study data results on "social psycologists". Perhaps someone can get a Ph.D. for that study! 😉
I posted this on a whining Krugman blogsite:
"Social sciences are not methodologically rigorous enough to comb out the biases that the people in the field uncritically accept as some sort of status quo. For a chronically-biased ultra-left preacher of economic nostrums who comically considers himself an "economist," Krugman must have felt a tiny pang of guilt before quashing it and writing this vapid piece of self-exoneration.
I see a highly-regarded psychologist who considers 'cognitive psychology' and any science with the "c" word in front of it as automatically meriting consideration as a legally and academically authorized form of sheer gimquackery. Or as the British would say, "rubbish.""
I would have said total garbage and lies, rubbish and nonsense, but at the New York Times, your comment is never posted until vetted by a certified member of the thought police looking for any excuse to strike down a submission.
Dr. Haidt admits drifting from the left to the center. In the words of the great Scooby-Doo: "Ruh-roh!"
Remember his name — you may be speaking it in the same breath with in future years with another outlier brave enough to ask, "Can someone explain to me why we don't like conservatives?": Bernard Goldberg.
@maggie:
"@Tlaloc, I think that you miss the whole point of the observation that Dr. Haidt was making and it has nothing to do with the unscientific message of his observation:
“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.” "
The problem with that is that you can in no way relate gender/ethnicity and political views. They are entirely different things. When you see a field dominated by men there is good reason to ask if gender discrimination works because women and men are fundamentally the same. Sexual dimorphism in humans is almost nonexistent. And the one "carrer" where the few differences would be most meaningful (prostitution) is illegal in geenral ain the western world anyway.
On the other hand conservativism/liberalism is a point of view, it arises nt from genetic chance but from experiences and upbringing. There's no reason in the world to assume that conservatives are as likely to want to become social scientists or that the process of training a social scientist is as likely to produce a conservative. Just as MBAs are predominately conservative, people who are conservative are more likely to see business as a good carreer option and the process of getting an MBA reinforces conservative concepts.
Do you want MBAs then to be forced to take classes that reinforce liberal concepts so as to try and artificially even out this "imbalance?"
One tiny diff in effect of the ideological skew, whether statistically supportable or no, between MBAs and social scientists:
One is in the biz of making business, understanding markets and managing money, and the other in the biz of being in our business, of parsing us and then managing Society according to The Correct Worldview.