A Double Shock to Liberal Professors

haidt200.jpgSocial psychology has long been a haven for left-wing scholars. Jonathan Haidt, one of  the best known and most respected young social psychologists, has heaved two bombshells at his field–one indicting it for effectively excluding conservatives (he is a liberal) and the other for what he sees as a jaundiced and cult-like opposition to religion (he is an atheist).

Here he is on the treatment of conservatives:

I submit to you that the under-representation of conservatives in social psychology, by a factor of several hundred, is evidence that we are a tribal moral community that actively discourages conservatives from entering. … We should take our own rhetoric about the benefits of diversity seriously and apply it to ourselves. … Just imagine if we had a true diversity of perspectives in social psychology.  Imagine if conservative students felt free enough to challenge our dominant ideas, and bold enough to pull us out of our deepest ideological ruts. That is my vision for our bright  post-partisan future.

And here he is on religion:

Surveys have long shown that religious believers in the United States are happier, healthier, longer-lived, and more generous to charity and to each other than are secular people.  Most of these effects have been documented in Europe too. …Atheists may have many other virtues, but on one of the least controversial and most objective measures of moral behavior — giving time, money, and blood to help strangers in need — religious people appear to be morally superior.

Bombshell Number One fell four years ago in an unusually influential article. ("Moral Psychology and the Misunderstanding of Religion") Haidt argued that the New Atheists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, together with the secular psychology profession more generally, have failed to grasp the positive role that belief and religious ritual plays in the social life of religious people.  In their focus on religion's capacity to generate intolerance and other social harms, the psychology profession and the more outspoken religion critics of recent years, Haidt wrote, missed the all-important binding and community-forming role that traditional religious belief and religious practice frequently perform.

durkheim.jpgHaidt's earliest professional interest was in the psychology of moral systems and moral beliefs, and his interest in religion sprung from this early academic concern.  While he initially tended to view religion in a negative light, his reading of the French sociologist Emile Durkheim gave him greater appreciation for the community-forming and morality-reinforcing importance of shared religious beliefs. "If you want to describe human morality, rather than the morality of educated Western academics," Haidt said, "you've got to include the Durkheimian view that morality is in large part about binding people together."  Religion, Haidt said, has been misunderstood by many Western academics because they focus too often on its (often dubious) truth claims or on its (often negative) contributions to modern secular notions of fairness and justice.  But religion is a much more multi-faceted phenomenon than Western secularists attribute to it, Haidt wrote, and from the standpoint of moral psychology it must be acknowledged as one of the greatest forces there is in suppressing human selfishness and furthering cooperation and cohesion among its practitioners (though this cooperation and cohesion, Haidt readily admitted, is often purchased at the expense of hostility towards outsiders or internal dissidents).

Haidt backed up his claim about the social benefits of religion by summarizing some of the empirical evidence on the topic, drawing heavily from economist Arthur Brooks' important study, Who Really Cares:

If you believe that morality is about happiness and suffering, then I think you are obligated to take a close look at the way religious people actually live and ask what they are doing right.  … [Not only are religious people more charitable among themselves], religious believers give more money than secular folk to secular charities, and to their neighbors.  They give more of their time, too, and of their blood.

Haidt concluded his article on a Burkean note suggesting that such longstanding practices and ways of life as found in the world's religions are likely to contain at least "some wisdom, some insights into ways of suppressing selfishness, enhancing cooperation, and ultimately enhancing human flourishing."  Haidt's bottom line was that much of contemporary moral and social psychology had misunderstood religion, reduced it to only one of its dimensions, and failed to acknowledge its unquestionably positive role in furthering at least certain types of moral conduct.      

His Critics Respond

Haidt's article was republished on the website www.edge.org where several distinguished academic psychologists and intellectuals were asked to comment. Some respondents agreed with the claim that secular investigators of religion often miss its positive dimensions, but other respondents, including most vehemently Sam Harris, repeated their ongoing indictment of religion as an unmitigated disaster for humanity.  In response to these latter critics Haidt offered an account of his own change of heart on the subject.  "I want to make it clear that I am not an apologist for religion," he said. "I used to dislike all religions, back when I thought of them as systems of belief that helped individuals understand the world and cope with the unknown.  After reading Durkheim and D.S. Wilson I now think of religions first and foremost as coordination devices that bind people together into moral communities with effects that are mostly good for the members, although sometimes terrible for deviants and for neighboring groups.  Whether the net effects of religion for humanity are good or bad is a complex empirical question, the answer to which varies by religion, by era, and by what terms we include in our cost/benefit analysis.  I am motivated neither to convict nor to acquit [religion], but if religion is to be subject to trial by science, I want the trial to be fair.  Until we [social scientists] acknowledge a latent prejudice, however, we will have trouble understanding the accused."

Haidt compared religion and its social-binding role to that of college fraternities and college sports teams, and he related how his views on the social utility of these collegiate institutions had undergone the very same kind of change and development as his views on religion.  "I used to wish," he explained, "that all fraternities and major sports teams would disappear from my university — I thought of them as tribal institutions that brought out the ugly and sometimes violent side of young people. But after talking with athletes, fraternity members, and fundraisers I realized that these institutions create powerful feelings of belonging which have enormous benefits for the participants while making them fiercely loyal and extraordinarily generous later on to the University of Virginia.  Fraternities and sports teams contribute greatly to the strong school spirit at UVA, and to our rapidly growing endowment." Haidt went on to explain that all students, not just the athletes and fraternity members, benefit from the externalities created by these communal ties. 

The Second Bombshell

Needless to say, Haidt was hardly playing it safe among his fellow academics by coming up with good reasons to support religion, varsity sports, and college fraternities in America.  But his defense of currently out-of-favor groups and beliefs hardly prepared his social psychology colleagues for his second iconoclastic bombshell delivered this past January.  At the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology — the leading professional organization in the discipline — Haidt accused his fellow social psychologists of being "a tribal moral community" that acted in many ways like a narrow-minded religious cult bound together by a set of highly partisan political beliefs and "blind to any ideas or findings that threaten our sacred values." To an academic audience that prides itself on its open-mindedness, its tolerance of diversity, and its single-minded pursuit of truth, these were "fighting words" and Haidt made sure he backed up his assertion with strong evidence from a variety of domains.

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Just look at the Larry Summers firing at Harvard, Haidt began.  The wider distribution curve for IQs among men than women may be one reason, Summers suggested, why women are underrepresented in the math and science intensive fields at the most competitive institutions like Harvard,  since greater variance means larger numbers of males at both the low and high end of the ability distribution.  Such a hypothesis is certainly worth exploring, Haidt said, yet for those within the tribal force field of left-liberal academia such "is not a permissible hypothesis." "It is a sacrilege. It blames the victim rather than the powerful."  The ensuing outrage over Summers' hypothesis, Haidt explained, forced the Harvard president to resign.  "[Yet] we psychologists should have been outraged by the outrage," Haidt complained.  "We should have defended his right to think freely."  The social psychologists, however, like most other academics, did nothing, kept quiet about the matter, and passively watched as Summers was forced to resign for his heretical suggestion.

Haidt then explained to his colleagues his strenuous efforts to find social psychologists who dissented from the prevailing left/liberal political perspective dominant in the field with publicly acknowledged political leanings of a conservative or right-of-center character.  But it proved a most difficult task.  A Google search under the phrase "liberal social psychologist" turned up 2740 hits, Haidt announced to his audience, while "conservative social psychologist" turned up a total of three hits.  And none of the three conservative hits turned out to produce the names of a single, real-life, conservative social psychologist. 

But Haidt persisted.  After emailing 30 colleagues and friends in the social psychology field, and querying them if they knew of any conservatives in the field, one genuine conservative was found. That was Rick McCauley of Bryn Mawr College, a specialist on the psychology of terrorism.  Haidt had actually met McCauley years earlier during his student days at the University of Pennsylvania where McCauley was a friend of one of Haidt's academic advisors:  "When I first met Rick [as a student at Penn] I was wary of him," Haidt explained.  "I had heard that he was a conservative.  … I had never before met an actual conservative professor, and it took me a while to realize how valuable it was to hear from someone with a different perspective."  Haidt went on to explain that many of McCauley's later insights in the social psychology field were only made possible because "he stands outside of the liberal force field" of the contemporary psychology profession.  Without his dissenting political perspective, Haidt suggested, McCauley might not have come up with his particularly valuable angle on political terrorism.       

With a huge audience of social psychologists representing a reasonably good cross section of those in the field, Haidt had an ideal situation at the annual meeting to do some informal polling to confirm his claim of an ideological monopoly of the left.  He asked the assembled multitude which of four categories best described their political leanings:  1) liberal or left-of-center, 2) centrist or moderate, 3) libertarian, or 4) conservative or right- of-center.  By a show of hands, between 80 and 90 percent of the audience indicated they were "liberal or left- of-center," while in this enormous audience that Haidt estimated numbered about 1000, there were only 20 with "centrist or moderate" political views, 12 with "libertarian" views, and only three described their views as "conservative or right-of-center."   Conservatives thus made up less than 1 percent of the social psychologists assembled, in a country, Haidt reminded his audience, in which 40 percent of the public describe their political views in this manner.

This virtual absence of right-of-center voices, Haidt boldly proclaimed, "is evidence that we are a tribal moral community that actively discourages conservatives from entering."   He backed up this claim with two letters he had solicited from non-liberal graduate students who spoke of their reluctance to express their political views because they were middle-of-the-road in their politics and not liberal. "I consider myself very middle of the road politically," one wrote. "[I am] a social liberal but fiscal conservative.  Nonetheless, I avoid the topic of politics around work." Both of these graduate students, Haidt explained, "said they are not conservative, but neither are they liberal, and because they are not liberal, they feel pressure to keep quiet."  To back up his claim that social psychologists, knowingly or unknowingly, create a hostile and unwelcoming work environment for students or faculty with non-conforming political views Haidt cited the words of a previous speaker at the convention: "I'm a good liberal Democrat, just like every other social psychologist I know."

Haidt's indictment of the social psychology profession was devastating.  While cult-like or conformist tribal behavior may have its benefits for a religious group — Haidt, had made just this point in his earlier writings — it has no place in science, he declared.  "We social psychologists" said Haidt, think of ourselves as "super-tolerant free thinkers.  We celebrate diversity and non-conformity. We boldly follow our science wherever it takes us, and no matter whom it offends.  We care only about truth!"  In reality, however, Haidt went on to explain, "we are a tribal moral community. … We have sacred values other than truth; we have taboos that constrain our thinking; we have almost no moral/political diversity; and we have created a hostile climate for graduate students who don't share those sacred values." 

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Haidt concluded his address with a plea that social psychology develop a more welcoming attitude toward those who don't share the left-liberal viewpoint on moral and political issues.  Having a few conservatives within the profession would be a healthy development, he said, just as bringing women into the profession at an earlier period was healthy. "We should make it a priority," he said, "to find, nurture, and welcome a few dozen conservatives into our ranks."  Such a development, he explained, would bring fresh ideas into the profession and no doubt lead to new areas and topics of exploration.  Haidt also suggested that his colleagues try to familiarize themselves with viewpoints that they rarely hear from talking to one another.  He specifically recommended in this context that they read Thomas Sowell's A Conflict of Visions and read a conservative magazine like National Review. Haidt explained that he personally reads eight periodicals a month, seven of which have left-of-center viewpoints, "but I get more new ideas from reading National Review than from any of the others."

Haidt's Colleagues Respond

Like his earlier article on the treatment of religion by academic psychologists and the New Atheists, Haidt's address on the leftist bias of the social psychology profession was reproduced on the www.edge.org website where various colleagues were asked to respond.  Some of the responses did more than Haidt could ever have done to confirm his claim that a tribal or cult-like insularity and conformity informs many in the social psychology profession.  One distinguished psychologist, a Harvard professor, suggested that the near monopoly of people on the left among social psychologists might simply reflect the fact, not that there are barriers to entry for conservatives, but that "liberals may be more interested in new ideas, more willing to work for peanuts, or just more intelligent, all of which may push them to pursue the academic life while deterring their conservative peers."  Another professor from NYU suggested that the fact that so many ordinary Americans are conservative but almost all social psychologists are liberal may simply reflect the greater knowledge and expertise of the latter.  "We should ask honestly," he wrote, "whether social scientists are too liberal or society is too conservative."  "After all," he went on to explain, "when experts and laypersons disagree, we do not usually rush to the conclusion that the experts are biased."

Not all of the responses to Haidt's address were hostile, however — or ideologically self-serving.  Lee Jussim, for instance, the chairman of Rutgers psychology department, had this to say: "I cannot sufficiently express my gratitude to, and enthusiasm for, Jon Haidt's speech.  As he so refreshingly pointed out, liberal bias infects, distorts, and undermines the quality of our science. … If [Haidt's speech] leads even one researcher to be more sensitive to the extraordinary double standards and blindness that sometimes taint our field, it will have been a rousing success."

Another supporter of Haidt's speech was Paul Bloom, professor of psychology at Yale.  To get across Haidt's central idea of a hostile work environment confronting non-conformists, Bloom asked his fellow psychologists to imagine the following scenario:

Imagine that you are a beginning graduate student accepted into a top-ranked psychology department.  The first colloquium talk you go to is about deception, from a famous social psychologist.  In the middle of her talk, she makes a remark about how some people are simply incapable of ever telling the truth, and then she puts up a large picture of Barack Obama.  People roar with laughter, and there's a bit of applause.  You are a teaching fellow in a large Introduction to Psychology course, and the professor talks a bit about popular delusions, giving the example of liberals who believe in global warming.  Al Gore is mentioned in a lecture on clinical psychology, in the context of narcissistic personality disorder.  Everyone you know is a conservative Republican and assumes that you are one too, making off-hand jokes to you about brain-dead liberals.  But suppose you are, in fact, a liberal yourself.  How would you feel about this new life you have chosen?

Bloom then went on to state the obvious: "Nobody wants to be part of a community where their identity is the target of ridicule and malice."  This, he said, is obvious to social psychologists in dealing with all sorts of other biases involving gender, race, and sexual orientation.  It should be obvious, too, he said, for biases against those who hold political views outside the left-liberal mainstream.  For a community that proclaims the value of diversity, Bloom said, we should be much more sensitive to these issues of political bias. "Jon is right that we should do better."

A Model of Academic Self-Analysis

 It is almost impossible to overstate the courage, intellectual clarity, and simple wisdom involved in Jonathan Haidt's challenges to his social psychology colleagues.  His message is as uncompromising as it is uncomplicated: open up the discipline to viewpoints outside the narrow, left-liberal mainstream, learn from people who have political and moral views different than you own, treat religion more fairly, and stop acting like an insular tribal cult and act more like the open-minded science profession you claim to be.

That's a powerful message and one can only wish that it is heard not only by the social psychology profession but by almost all the other current disciplines within the social sciences and humanities.  Studies by economist Daniel Klein and others have documented the extreme ideological uniformity and insularity among a host of academic disciplines, psychology being just one.  Sociology, anthropology, and women's studies have been found to be even more ideologically skewed than psychology. People outside the left-liberal hegemony that reigns in these disciplines feel intimidated and unwelcomed, and even if a student may feel some attraction to academic life, those with conservative, libertarian, or other dissenting viewpoints will be turned away by an academic culture that they correctly perceive is hostile to their differing values and perspectives. Haidt's exploration of the social psychology profession is a model of constructive academic self-analysis and self-criticism — and one we can only wish is duplicated by leaders in other disciplines.

Author

  • Russell K. Nieli

    Russell K. Nieli is a Senior Preceptor in Princeton University's James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, and a Lecturer in Princeton's Politics Department. He is the author of "Wounds That Will Not Heal: Affirmative Action and Our Continuing Racial Divide."

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26 thoughts on “A Double Shock to Liberal Professors

  1. Haidt’s suggestion that his colleagues read Thomas Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions shouldn’t be lost on those concerned with this issue. In my mind that particular book incisively illustrates that there are larger presuppositions lying underneath most political (and social science) viewpoints. It’s a bit heavy to get through but is worth the effort if you really want to understand why conservatives and liberals tend to vociferously talk past each other.

  2. I enjoyed the article and comments, thank you.
    What are the chances that a graduate program exploits this distortion by forming a “conservative” social psychology graduate school, thereby capturing all the best “conservative” social psychologists? Like George Mason, Chapman, UofC, etc.

  3. I am amused and bemused by Russell K. Nieli’s ‘Sommers-ification’ of the Harvard and NYU professors for their response to Haidt. The offered propositions which, while likely not provable, are nevertheless worthy of examination. It is taboo to wonder, or perhaps even test, to see if liberals are ‘smarter than conservatives’?
    I think the claim cannot be proved, but it is a line of inquiry that should not be cut off at the knees because it offends the sensibilities.

  4. Haidt’s been a hero of mine for years.
    I believe his observations provide the key required to unlock the most crucial mystery of our time: the left/liberals’ irrational fascination and susceptibility to collectivist dogma. (http://tinyurl.com/yem36zx)

  5. Khormet says, “In turn, this means that the worth of an idea is judge solely by its predictive power and not the authority of who said it. The history of hard sciences is the history of each new generation of scientist using hard measurements of experimental results to overturn the ideas of the greybeards. Hated and scorned outsiders routinely win scientific debates against the most established figures in hard fields.”
    You mean like the creation/evolution debates the evolutionists dispensed with because the creationists won them all?
    Lovely post, whatever you meant.

  6. It is almost impossible to overstate the courage, intellectual clarity, and simple wisdom involved in Jonathan Haidt’s challenges to his social psychology colleagues. His message is as uncompromising as it is uncomplicated: open up the discipline to viewpoints outside the narrow, left-liberal mainstream, learn from people who have political and moral views different than you own, treat religion more fairly, and stop acting like an insular tribal cult and act more like the open-minded science profession you claim to be.
    True, but
    “‘We should make it a priority,’ he said, ‘to find, nurture, and welcome a few dozen conservatives into our ranks.’ Such a development, he explained, would bring fresh ideas into the profession and no doubt lead to new areas and topics of exploration”
    while also true still smacks of a rather supercilious, us-vs-them smugness: “we” need a few dozen of these weird ducks around so “we” can learn from “them.” As such, it’s a perfect mirror image of the justification for racial “diversity”: “we” can’t get a good education unless we are exposed to a few of “them.”

  7. I have an advanced degree with a major in social psychology. When people ask about my educational background, I generally reply that I have a degree in experimental psychology, undertaking to move the conversation away from social liberalism (opinion) toward scientific research (data).

  8. Good comment Khornet.
    That expains why there are somewhat more conservatives in the hard sciences. Although even there they are underrepresented, probably because they are stil persecuted by the leftists in the rest of academia.
    I think another reason why leftists tend to flock to the soft sciences is that these sciences are often used to justify various gov interventions. Since leftists favor more gov intervention, they would naturally be attracted.
    By the way, climate science masquaredes as a hard science, but their actual procedures and predictions look pretty soft to me. I see no sign of falsifiable predictions, replicable experiments, transparent data and evaluation methods, real engagement with critics, etc.
    Meteorology on the other hand is much more solid, because their predictions end up being confirmed or denied within weeks rather than decades, so they are subject to more real world discipline. That might be why global warming skeptics are more likely to come from the ranks of meteoroligists. They can’t just mouth off good groupthink theories to impress their superiors and their political sponsors, they actually have to acurately predict tommorrows weather, so its much easier to seperate the leftist charlatans from the guys that know what they are doing.

  9. If your basic concept of humanity is one of cooperative communalism, it is natural to think of religion as introducing divisive elements and proceeding to label it a root of evil.
    If your basic concept of humanity is of continual internecine stife, you can see religions as providing a structure to mitigate this and allow a larger cooperative community. This provides a base for development of big, good stuff, like civilization, commerce, airplanes….
    An unfortunate side effect of larger cooperatives is that the conflicts between (larger) groups can be orders of magnitude more severe, perhaps eventually existentially destructive. But the alternative is … what?

  10. The liberal-arts and the soft sciences within them are highly conforming because within those fields, the truth of a proposition is determined solely by a consensus of the credentialed. This leads to a situation identical to that found in a priest caste. When any priest makes a statement it must be true because all the other priest agree. Any priest who deviates from the group orthodoxy raises doubts in the laity breaks the rice bowl of all the priest.
    Sciences are considered “hard” when the phenomena they study can be objectively, accurately, reliably and reproducibly measured. Physics is a hard science because we can precisely measure most of the physical phenomena it deals with. Hard measurement allows for the precise falsification of hypothesis. Ideas can be destructively tested.
    In turn, this means that the worth of an idea is judge solely by its predictive power and not the authority of who said it. The history of hard sciences is the history of each new generation of scientist using hard measurements of experimental results to overturn the ideas of the greybeards. Hated and scorned outsiders routinely win scientific debates against the most established figures in hard fields.
    No such mechanism exists in the soft sciences and the liberal-arts. The phenomena that soft sciences like sociology, psychology and economics try to study are fantastically difficult to measure. How to you actually measure racism or a groups work ethic? What is the GNP really?
    Unable to solve debates by experiment and hard measurement, they instead resort to group consensus. So, in the end, “facts” are what the group says they are. This is why the history of the liberal-arts and the soft sciences is the history of strange fads that follow and justify the contemporary political fads and movements.
    Academics try to maintain their elite reputations by flushing their faddish history down the memory hole but when you study the evolution of ideas in those fields, it is quite clear they are dominated by social processes and not scientific measurement.
    However, that only explains why these types of academics cluster ideologically, It doesn’t explain why they cluster on the political Left.
    Those in the humanities and soft sciences end up disproportionately Leftists because Leftism, at its core, is an ideology that seeks to make the intellectuals the highest status and most powerful group in society. Everybody feels the tug of such an ideology. Everyone feels tempted to adopt an ideology that justifies our own innate desires for status and power. It is just that the rest of us have to deal with physical reality a great deal and the school of hard knocks beats it out of us.
    These academics have no such natural correction. Detached from physical reality by their inability to measure, these intellectuals simply gradually succumb to an all encompassing political ideology that justifies their perception of themselves as superior.
    So, in the end, those in the soft sciences are Leftists because they are pursuing their own selfish material and emotional ends just like everyone else. Likewise, self-interest causes them to enforce a near religious degree of intellectual conformity on their peers. They are not worse about these temptations than the rest of us,but unlike they rest of us, they believe themselves utterly immune to such base impulses. Therefore, they never stop and ask if they could be individually or collectively wrong.
    That is what makes them dangerous.

  11. “Religion, Haidt said, has been ignored by Western academics because they focus too often on it (often dubious) truth claims or its (often negative) contributions to modern secular notions of fairness and justice.”
    Really? Dubious? Negative? Examples, please? Nice bit of sly condescension there.

  12. There are a couple of things I would add. It is necessary for liberals to enforce group think because their ideas cannot withstand challenge. The business with Summers is an excellent example. In this way they are like the worst of religions with the exception that they don’t offer much on the tangibly positive side to balance the scales.
    As an atheist I would also like to state something that is often overlooked. I don’t have an invisible man in the fight but it is clear that not all religions are the same. Islam for instance is founded on violence and the example of their prophet, or perfect man, is one that is rife with murder, slavery, compulsion and brigandry just to name a few of Mohammed’s obvious and admitted crimes. For all of Christianity’s faults it would be difficult to factually claim that Christ’s life was not a good example to follow. That is why when someone tries to lump all religions together it is a non-starter and bespeaks an agenda other than seeking the truth. That I have to point this out says something about how far the field has to go before it can be taken seriously. I have no doubt that there would be a high moral sanction to those in the field who are critical of Islam if they don’t do the PC thing and criticize all religions equally but they only discredit themselves in doing so.
    Another factor I would add is that conservatives do not have as much tolerance for BS as leftists do. I think this can go a long way towards explaining why there are not as many of them in fields that are of such little value as social psychology. Perhaps the field has made some great contribution without which we would all be suffering mightily. I do not find this likely. To the extent we are learning something about the biological basis of behavior we are gaining true knowledge. But if the social psychologists think they are discovering some great truths about human behavior then I think it just illustrates their ignorance of history. There is nothing new under the sun and it has all been observed and commented on before.
    Looking at it from a leftist’s perspective social psychology is a very attractive field since you have a protected sinecure which requires nothing of you that anyone actually wants (that is to say something that people would pay for short of coercion)and there is no metric by which your work will be judged that has any meaning. It is essentially a welfare check with more prestige. There isn’t much of an appeal to that sort of thing for a conservative. That is the sad and ugly truth of it.

  13. (Mr. Haidt, thank you for dropping by. I have referred to your research on different axes of moral decision-making at my own site…with some disagreement, but mostly with approval. As one who was raised and educated in the Arts & Humanites Tribe, I write on its closed tribalism.)
    I will certainly link back to this. Haidt, as I note above has other research that goes against type, and has shown a rare ability to at least grasp another POV, even if not agreeing. Way back in the 1970’s at William and Mary, I did a satirical piece on applying anthropological principles to understanding various campus groups. I doubt it was brilliantly done, but it should be noted that the document continued to circulate in the anthropology and sociology departments for a few months, MINUS the sections on themselves.
    As I was still a committed liberal then, I did not fully pick up on the meaning of the omission.

  14. Could this “Haidt Effect”, for lack of a better name, been observed in the recent video of a luncheon meeting of NPR executives and ostensible Muslim donors.?

  15. Dear Mr. Nieli:
    I am so grateful for this thoughtful and perfect integration of the various “bombs” that I’ve thrown over the years. If anyone wants to learn more about the issues and the controversy, I’ve collected resources on my homepage, http://www.JonathanHaidt.com. I just want to respond to your readers who think that social psychology is hopelessly biased or tribal. The problems are limited to the fields that touch on sacred values. 90% of what social psychologists do are unaffected by these problems. My field is not sick, but it is unbalanced, and I”m hoping to correct the balance.
    Thank you,
    jon haidt

  16. First, let’s clarify the terminology.
    The problem with the term “left-liberal”, is that its connotations have changed every generation, from communal to socialist to populist to communitarian to, I think at present, statist. So, in 2011, the category would be better described as a bias towards statist models of social relations, and so a prejudice against cultural, relgious, or
    market models.
    So, starting there, we have people raised K-12, undergrad, grad, and professional degree, attending government institutions or getting a government check, and having a bias towards statist models of problem solving. Not surprised.
    Add in inculturation by a long apprenticeship in grad and professional circles with others whose careers operate within the same framework, and everybody starts to look, intellectually, the same.
    The point I’m making is, while, yea, you can hire a couple of token conservatives, and I guess feel good about it, but so what. Instead, develope funding sources and work in settings outside of the academia/state, like, private foundations, within businesses, withing religious foundations.
    Those entities might very well not give a rat’s ass about this line of science. But for the sake of the science itself.

  17. As an atheist, I’m puzzled by the outright hostility to religion that many “professional atheists” express. If examined objectively, even most religious wars are conducted to acquire land and resources. Just because some guy in a pointy hat says otherwise is no reason believe rank politics isn’t the cause.
    If religion never existed, humans would have found plenty of alternative justifications to kill one another. Intolerance of The Other is not the exclusive property of religious believers.

  18. Anecdotally, I can say that those in the engineering and “hard science” arenas tend to be more conservative, although far from monolithically so. At the risk of sounding self-serving, I note that these arenas favor those who can produce “stuff that works” rather than merely talking a good game. Flights of fancy and radical departures from the status quo are thus high-risk endeavors. We don’t have the luxury of taking a chance that what we build will fail when met with the rigors of the real world.
    Full disclosure: Politically I am a “soft” libertarian/moderate. Religiously I am a moderately conservative Christian.

  19. Stealing Haidt’s own words, I now think of *social psychology* first and foremost as coordination devices that bind people together into moral communities with effects that are mostly good for the members, although sometimes terrible for deviants and for neighboring groups [like, say, conservative social psychologists].
    Social psychologists are nothing more than a religious pot calling the other religions a kettle.

  20. Tribalism is the most basic social construct that I can think of aside from familial blood ties. That all these so-called sophisticates fail to see or choose to ignore their own more basic social instincts points to the overwhelming power of denial and raionalization. They’re above it all, you see. Bloody hilarious, except for its consequences.
    All belief systems are ideological and wield enormous psychological power over the individual members. Marxist or theist, it makes no difference, the follower is awarded with the relief of existential anxiety by a zealous sense of superiority. The stronger the belief the greater the relief. Actually that reality tilts the morality arrow towards religion: doubt is the essence of faith in God whereas social psychologists actually think they are practicing “SCIENCE.”
    Academics, feh.

  21. In my experience as a venture entrepreneur, there are plenty of conservative intellects (though maybe not in the social sciences). They seek out the working world with the same fervor that liberals seek the cocoon of academe.
    Thirty years ago, I applied to grad school at Stanford. The registrar invited me to her office to tell me I had the highest entrance test scores they had seen “in some years.” I didn’t get the feeling I was there for a pat on the back. I got the feeling I was invited in to be checked out for political outlook as my undergrad work was at Texas. I chose not to pursue a grad degree.

  22. Some decades back a congressman from New York, considered highly intelligent, predicted the destruction of black nuclear families due to the effects of liberal policies. Roundly denounced, he faded from any prominence. His predictions came true, but, that had no effect on those promulgating liberal policies. After all, he was one lone voice, though a liberal voice, and could happily be ignored.
    Want to predict whether or not Haidt’s bombs have any lasting effect on the liberal bastion he hopes to heal?

  23. Odd. What most thinking men accept as obvious truths and long-accepted cliches are hailed as “bombshells” in academia. Perhaps a few more bombshells will get these eggheads to realize that “social psychology” itself is not just a contradiction in terms but buffoonery.

  24. Wonderful article. Haidt has done us all a very great service. Introspection in higher education seems to be a lost art, even though it is critical to science.

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