Kickin' It Old School

Last year I wrote a post entitled Gender Bender, about the National Science Foundation spending $135 million on a "gender bias program" called Advance, which was/is aimed at improving the lot of women in the sciences.  If you read the article, you'll find that the NSF does more harm than good in helping women to advance.  It should come as no surprise then that in a recent article by John Tierney, printed in the New York Times, at a recent conference of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, a social psychologist found that his research on the very people who do all these various studies are, themselves, extremely biased.  In other words, psychologists and other lettered people who study our behavior regarding racial prejudice, homophobia, sexism, stereotype threat and unconscious bias against minorities, are themselves bigoted against those who might have a different opinion.

Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia, polled an audience recently by asking how many considered themselves liberal.  By Dr. Haidt's count, roughly 80% of the crowd affirmed this political allegiance.  "This is a statistically impossible lack of diversity," Dr. Haidt concluded, noting polls showing 40% of Americans are conservative and 20% are liberal.  Dr. Haidt said that social psychologists are a "tribal-moral community" united by "sacred values" that hinder research and blind them to the hostile climate they've created for non-liberals.

The New York Times article claims that studies independent of Dr. Haidt's find "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."  A  2007 study found that university psychologists who identify themselves as Democrats, outnumber their Republican counterparts 12 to 1.  According to Dr. Haidt, psychology, sociology and anthropology always attracted more liberals, but that their numbers increased disproportionately in the 1960's.  "The fight for civil rights and against racism became the sacred cause unifying the left throughout American society, and within the academy," he said, and that this shared morality both "binds and blinds."

Typical of this mindset was the criticism directed at Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1965 for his warnings that welfare assistance was leading to a rise in unmarried parenthood and welfare dependency amongst blacks.  "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."