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Haidt’s Final Response to Pigliucci

February 17th, 2011 by Jonathan Haidt

Dear Prof. Pigliucci:

When I challenged you to either 1) retract and apologize or 2) affirm your original post, I expected you to invent your own option 3, retracting or qualifying a few claims but not apologizing. Thank you for choosing option 2 so decisively!

I have three points to make in response, and then I will be done with our exchange.

1) When Bill Clinton said “there is no improper relationship” with Lewinsky, he spoke truthfully but deceptively. What the interviewer wanted to know was whether there HAD BEEN a relationship. You tell us that I was wrong to assume that you had not watched my talk before dismissing my argument. You say that in fact “I have indeed looked at it.” Did you mean to say “have” or “had?” If you meant “had,” then readers can better judge the quality of the reasoning in your initial post. Even though you knew my full argument, you dismissed it by focusing on one claim — that underrepresentation is not evidence of bias – which is a claim that I myself made in the talk. But if you really meant “have,” as in “I have now watched the talk, after writing my initial post but before writing this response,” then please explain how your statement differs from Clinton’s.

2) You take issue with my use of Google, and I thank your reader for pointing out to us the difference between the number of hits Google says it found vs. the number of pages it actually delivers. But my basic point still stands: Google finds many cases of “liberal social psychologist” which refer to actual psychologists, but just three hits for “conservative social psychologist,” none of which point to an actual psychologist. You say you found 10 cases of the latter phrase, but did you notice that seven of them referred to my talk?

Your more revealing error is your claim about the role that the Google example played in my argument. You said that my conclusion from it was “Voilà, case closed, bias demonstrated!” Yet anyone who watched the talk knows that this was just my opening example, intended to be humorous, but also intended as one of three demonstrations that it’s very hard to identify any conservative social psychologists, and that point itself was just one of three arguments that my field has become a tribal moral community. I’m no philosopher, but I’m pretty sure that “case opened” is not the same thing as “case closed.”

3) You deny that you have accused me of academic misconduct, and you warn me that I myself may have done something ethically wrong in “throwing those words around.” You say you were just raising a theoretical possibility of motivated cognition. I repeat your original words here:

I suspect that Haidt is either an incompetent psychologist (not likely) or is disingenuously saying the sort of things controversial enough to get him in the New York Times (more likely).

You also called me “silly” and you called my talk “garbage.” Readers will judge for themselves which of us writes recklessly and unprofessionally.

* * *

I have greatly enjoyed our debate. You assert that I “got upset” by your initial post, and you refer to my “outrage” at your accusations. But in fact I was delighted by them. I am an intuitionist. I am building an extended argument that reasoning, when not informed by broad understanding and cultivated intuitions, is an unreliable tool for finding truth. There is mounting evidence in psychology that the evolved function of reasoning is not discovery but social justification and manipulation. We humans use reasoning skillfully to find arguments in support of our intuitively held positions, but we are hobbled by the confirmation bias; we are unable to find evidence or arguments that contradict our favored positions. I believe this is the most serious defect in the writings of the “new atheists” and many other self-proclaimed rationalists: because they are so good at finding reasons to support their views about science and religion, they develop an extraordinary confidence that they are right, which makes them prone to arrogant dismissals of all who disagree with them.

When I issued my challenge to you, I knew that I would soon obtain either an apology or a classroom-worthy demonstration of rationalism in action.

Jonathan Haidt

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p.s., If readers would like to see experimental evidence of bias against non-liberals in the academy, or studies of the relative intelligence of liberals and conservatives, they are posted here.

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Update: Pigliucci’s response is this comment, posted on his last blog entry:

Hmm, I really don’t think I’m being Clintonesque here. And the slides in the talk make it clear that the google example was central to the argument, especially as data are concerned. But this exchange has gone on long enough, considering that it’s not even about a peer reviewed paper.

In other words: he still won’t say whether he HAD watched my talk before writing his initial post.

Posted in Uncategorized | 14 Comments »

Discrimination Hurts Real People

February 17th, 2011 by Jonathan Haidt

Many critics of my thesis about “tribal moral communities” claim either that 1) there is no actual discrimination against conservatives (because their underrepresentation reflects only self-selection) or 2) discrimination against conservatives is justified, because conservatives are dumb, closed minded, or anti-science. Many of these arguments hinge on claims about group differences, such as the regression coefficient relating politics and IQ, or the degree to which distributions overlap on traits such as openness to experience. But as Ravi Iyer put it in a recent post: on this blog:

These are not just data points, but actual human beings.  One human being discriminated against is one human being we could serve better, even if the vast majority of under-representation is due to self-selection.

Ravi exemplifies the compassion and open-mindedness of liberalism at its best. (In fact, his name was the 4th hit in my Google search for “liberal social psychologist”). In an effort to appeal to compassion from others, I have gathered here selections from the dozens of emails I’ve received in the weeks since my talk was publicized. My talk included the phrase “Closeted Conservatives.”  I made no effort to solicit such reports, and I have received no emails from conservatives who deny that they have faced difficulties because of their political identity. I have edited these reports only to shorten them. I obtained permission from all of the writers to post their words anonymously. All are graduate students or faculty in the social sciences, mostly in social psychology.

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As a closet conservative minority I read the transcript of your talk with great interest and gratitude…  Everything you describe fits my experience perfectly.  As a well liked minority, I experience what you describe even more intensely.  My career is beginning to take off, and I find myself needing to hold my tongue more than ever.  I am travelling and publishing, started my Ph.D. at an elite university… but I find myself hiding my intellectual views and values every single day…. Like everyone else you have heard from I prefer anonymity for my own survival.

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I can’t begin to tell you how difficult it was for me in graduate school, because I am not a liberal Democrat. As one example, following Bush’s defeat of Kerry, one of my professors would email me every time a soldier’s death in Iraq made the headlines; he would call me out, publicly blaming me for not supporting Kerry in the election.

I was a reasonably successful graduate student, but the political ecology became too uncomfortable for me. Instead of seeking the professorship that I once worked toward, I am now leaving academia for a job in industry. Universities boast about actively seeking to ever-increase the numbers of under-represented minorities in their ranks. Although, as a fiscal conservative, I have found my minority political beliefs abjectly unwelcome. While articles in my college alumni magazine celebrate the wonderful diversity and universal acceptation present on campus, they fail to mention the one exception: those whose political beliefs are not in lock-step with theirs.

I hope that a community of scientists would welcome a debate of ideas. Isn’t that how we learn and move forward our respective fields? Since when are academics so afraid of a dissenting opinion? If the political climate inside the graduate school is only comfortable to liberal Democrats, then only liberal Democrats will remain. This is not only in Berkeley and Madison, this is in many of our universities…  Hopefully, looking forward, your efforts will make room for someone whose views are in the minority to remain an academic and not leave for more accepting pastures.

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I am a conservative social psychologist. I would describe myself as socially moderately liberal but very fiscally conservative. My research focuses on the malleability of stereotyping and prejudice.  I can also attest to the “hostile environment” when one is a conservative amongst the many liberal social psychologists.  While in graduate school, I was one of two conservatives within the whole psychology department.  Thus, that is when I quickly learned to avoid political discussions and to keep my opinions to myself.  For instance, I once had a professor yell at me and refuse to speak to me for two days all because I was respectfully critical of a political speech that he loved.  For this reason, I have actually counseled some of my past undergraduate students about how to better deal with being a conservative in academia!

I have often tried to respectfully disagree or debate with some of my very liberal social colleagues without much success.  I’ve often been told that as a social psychologist I should “know better” or that they are “disappointed” in me for holding an opinion that differed from theirs. The whole situation is one that continuously frustrates me as I strongly believe that the ability to avoid emotional moral reasoning is one of the biggest principles towards critical thinking.  That point, however, seems to be ignored time and time again.  Still, I refuse to quit.  After all, I would hope that the abundant research on stereotypes, prejudice, and intergroup relations would help social psychologists carefully evaluate their own stereotypes and biases that they hold against conservatives.

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As a student at ________University (in the UK) I read with interest an article about your latest research relating to bias among academics. I completely agree, and I share the sentiments expressed by your students who are ‘in the closet’. I am one of them. In England, where cuts to Higher Education are framed by those on the left as being ideologically driven, the currency of liberal rhetoric is becoming increasingly valued. Those who support measures to increase student fees, typically those of the right such as me (I am a fiscal conservative but a social liberal), cannot confidently or even legitimately speak up. I remember one former professor, who is a member of the Conservative Party in the UK, told me that students and colleagues have such an ill-conceived idea of centre-right politics that he might as well be a member of the SS since anything which isn’t left-wing is so poorly regarded by the majority. It is my opinion that the dominance of left-wing opinion drowns out those with an alternative view, and institutions which should be fostering intellectual debates about the future of our country are in fact creating an intellectual vacuum. It is interesting that your findings, in my opinion at least, are not confined to a single country but can be found in higher education institutions across the Pond. I think it is a shame: we are less enriched because of it.

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I’ve got a Ph.D. in Experimental Psych – emphasis in Social. But I don’t do much in Social psychology any more. I’m sure the reasons are multiple and varied – but I believe one of them is the lack of comfort I feel around my social psych colleagues. I’m an evangelical Christian. I don’t know if “conservative” is the best label or not, perhaps libertarian would be better. I’m certainly liberal in many ways as well. But as I reflect on where my sense of discomfort comes from I would probably most directly finger the implied belief that I perceive most of my colleagues hold – and that is a belief in the inability that a person of faith could be a real scientist, ostensibly because they would not be able to “tolerate” that truth, so to speak. This notion that there is an inherent conflict between a Christian worldview and a pursuit for truth is so pronounced that it makes it very hard to even bother with trying to combat it.

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I’m currently a Ph.D. student in a department of sociology…  I’m actually quite liberal on both social and fiscal issues.  Prior to enrolling in the sociology Ph.D. program I served as a police officer in a large city.  But, after only a few weeks in graduate school, I began to hide this fact from others and never spoke about it openly.  Colleagues were looking at me and interacting with me differently than other students.  I finally realized that I was being “labeled” a conservative before people had even spoken to me.  It was astonishing: even being LABELED conservative, regardless of whether I actually was conservative or not, had become detrimental to my experience in the department.  I presume this label was applied to me since many police officers are very conservative.  However, I had become the victim of the very type of negative labeling that these academics would pride themselves on trying to fight…

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I am a conservative, and like the students you mentioned, I felt very frustrated during my time in grad school. All of the faculty members were liberal, and they constantly made political jokes and comments, assuming that we all shared their ideology… I had originally wanted to do my dissertation on an ideological topic, but my advisor kind of steered me away from that. …

This specific issue affected me so much during my graduate school years, that it actually steered me away from research, and I took a teaching position at a local community college after graduation. Of course, I now see the same exact situation at my community college. It seems that “everyone” (including my department head and dean) is very socially liberal, and the other faculty constantly make fun of conservatives and bad-mouth them, assuming that I am a liberal–like everyone else! I do feel that even at the community college level, I must keep my views to myself or risk being discriminated against.

I do think (in fact I KNOW) that conservatives can bring an important alternative voice to the science of psychology. I have seen many instances of bias in the research that is being done, and in the interpretation of specific findings (although researchers can be blind to this phenomenon because of their ideology!) I do believe that in order to further social psychology as a science, this alternative and critical voice that is missing must eventually be heard. I wanted to write you to let you know that by speaking up, you are providing a voice for individuals like me (who have felt excluded for a very long time)!

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Whatever the reason for the underrepresentation of conservatives in social psychology, and in the social sciences more generally, the near-total absence of conservatives has allowed a tribal moral community to develop in many fields. Those who don’t share the same sacred values must either hide, leave, or live stigmatized lives with stunted career prospects. These are real people. We should do what we can to break up the moral force field and welcome them in.

Posted in academia, conservatives, empathy, fairness, incivility, liberals and conservatives, partisanship | 25 Comments »

Psychology is generally Continuous, not Categorical

February 16th, 2011 by Ravi Iyer

We live in a world where we often have to make categorical decisions.  We date someone or we don’t.  We marry them or we don’t.  We hire someone or we don’t.  We pick either the Democrat or the Republican.  There is no middle ground.

Unfortunately, the world isn’t necessarily organized in that fashion.  Few would believe there are such categorical distinctions.  Prospective dates have some degree of positive and negative qualities, rather than attributes being merely present or absent.  Are people either qualified or not for a job?  Most people instead belong along a continuum of professional ability, with some being very qualified (way above being merely adequately qualified) and some people being just below and just above the border of qualification.  Politicians aren’t uniformly liberal or conservative and we routinely see partisans on both sides upset at those who aren’t extreme enough and who toe the partisan line.

This may seem obvious, but the reason I bring it up now is that while most everyone would agree with this fact, when thought about more carefully, still many people continue to argue as if things are categorical.  There are two recent examples on the yourmorals blog.

First, the comment section of this post has become a debate (for many) over whether psychology is objective (science) or subjective (art).  Allow me to quote Gene, from this thread:

there is SOME objective knowledge that comes from psych research (anything that can be experimentally shown, is predictive, even if only statistically, it has value).

If you want to get really nitty gritty, even physics is not completely “objective”…it’s merely instrumental to understanding objectivity (see here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumentalism)

Most things are not completely objective or completely subjective, especially where human affect, behavior, and cognition is concerned.  Yes, psychology is less objective than physics…but it’s more objective than sculpture.  If I think that Paul McCartney sings better than I do, is that an objective or a subjective fact?  It’s objective in so far as a survey of people would detect a very large statistically significant difference between perceptions of our singing.  But it’s subjective in so far as it may not be true for a particular person (e.g. my wife and my mom).

What complicates things further is that many people who read psychology don’t really care about what happens to most people, but rather how the research applies to them.  Consider this very useful overview of how changing our consumption patterns can make people happier.  One of the recommendations is something that I tell people often, that experiences lead to more happiness than material things, an opinion shared by 57% of a national sample (and shown to be true for most in experimental research).  Yet, 34% of those people disagree (and some don’t benefit in experiments).  So is the statement that “buying experiences leads to more happiness than buying things” an objective or a subjective fact?  It’s true for a majority of people, but not for a significant minority.  It’s likely true for many groups, but certainly not all groups.  Yet many people still think we can definitively decide if psychology is objective or subjective, even though humans, unlike inanimate objects, don’t react predictably to situations, except perhaps in aggregate (e.g. we have free will or at least the illusion of it).  I can find truths that apply to all rocks or all electrons, but not for all humans.  But I can find truths that apply to many humans or most humans, and that might give someone insight into themselves, which is a valuable thing.

A second instance of categorical thinking on the yourmorals blog of late is Pigliucci’s critique of Haidt’s recent SPSP speech.  Haidt pointed out that there is underrepresentation of conservatives in social psychology compared to the population and cites both self-selection and discrimination as issues to varying degrees.  Many people (understandably) focus on the sexier charge of discrimination, and Pigliucci answered that he “suspect(s)  the obvious reason for the “imbalance” of political views in academia is that the low pay, long time before one gets to tenure (if ever), frequent rejection rates from journals and funding agencies, and the necessity to constantly engage one’s critical thinking skills naturally select against conservatives.”  But what if causality was continuous and not categorical.  Pigliucci may be entirely right about his obvious reason, yet there still could be some amount of discrimination.  Indeed, if there is one student somewhere whose ideas are supressed (and there was at least one in Haidt’s talk), then there is at least some degree of both self-selection and discrimination, meaning that a debate over what statistically causes underrepresentation misses the point.  Bear in mind that these are not just data points, but actual human beings.  One human being discriminated against is one human being we could serve better, even if the vast majority of under-representation is due to self-selection.

I’m obviously biased in the above debate, but these thoughts are not a response to that debate, but rather a response to almost every debate and decision I see in psychology.  Some other things that are continuous, and not categorical:

Journal Publication – Editors have to make categorical decisions to accept or reject papers, yet many papers that are accepted never get cited, while other papers are published through sheer persistence down the chain of  journal prominence.

Statistical Significance – A 94.9% chance of being right is not that different than a 95.1% chance of being right, yet it is treated as a categorical distinction called “significance” because we need to be able to say whether something is true or not, when in reality, all we have is some evidence toward the truth, that varies to some degree.  Even the best paper does not definitively prove anything and even the worst paper is some evidence toward something.

Authorship – Many people work on papers (often undergraduate research assistants) and are not authors, while others do fairly little and receive authorship.  Sometimes the first author does 90% of the work and sometimes they do 51%.  Yet they still receive the categorical distinction of first author.

Psychological conditions – Few psychological clinical conditions are categorical.  In reality, people have some degree of anxiety, rather than having or not having an anxiety disorder.  Yet, for insurance reasons, people have to be diagnosed categorically as having a particular condition.

Psychological constructs – Is shame the same as guilt or different?  Is shame the same as sadness?  Is shame the same as happiness?  The truth is that shame is somewhat like some of these constructs and less like others of these constructs.  Categorical distinctions between such constructs are useful for publications, but don’t really reflect the continuous nature of the real world.

I am sure that if I thought more, I could come up with many more examples of things that are continuous, but treated as categorical. In academia, perhaps we can eventually change our systems, leveraging technology, to acknowledge the continuous nature of things.  My real-world hope, as someone who believes that a world with less conflict is better than a world with more conflict, is that perhaps seeing things as continuous, rather than categorical, means that people will be less likely to make harsh judgments of others based on the idea that their beliefs are the categorical caricatures that we make them out to be.

– Ravi Iyer

Posted in academia, business of psychology, yourmorals.org | 1 Comment »

Haidt Requests Apology from Pigliucci

February 13th, 2011 by Jonathan Haidt

Massimo Pigliucci, the chair of the philosophy department at CUNY-Lehman, wrote a critique of me on his blog, Rationally Speaking, in which he accused me of professional misconduct.

His blog describes itself as reflecting “the Enlightenment figure Marquis de Condorcet’s idea of what a public intellectual… ought to be: someone who devotes himself to ‘the tracking down of prejudices in the hiding places where priests, the schools, the government, and all long-established institutions had gathered and protected them.‘”

Below is my response to Pigliucci, which I posted as a comment on his blog.

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Dear Prof. Pigliucci:

Let me be certain that I have understood you. You did not watch my talk, even though a link to it was embedded in the Tierney article. Instead, you picked out one piece of my argument (that the near-total absence of conservatives in social psychology is evidence of discrimination) and you made the standard response, the one that most bloggers have made: underrepresentation of any group is not, by itself, evidence of discrimination. That’s a good point; I made it myself quite explicitly in my talk:

Of course there are many reasons why conservatives would be underrepresented in social psychology, and most of them have nothing to do with discrimination or hostile climate. Research on personality consistently shows that liberals are higher on openness to experience. They’re more interested in novel ideas, and in trying to use science to improve society. So of course our field is and always will be mostly liberal. I don’t think we should ever strive for exact proportional representation.

In my talk I made it clear that I’m not concerned about simple underrepresentation. I did not even make the moral argument that we need ideological diversity to right an injustice. Rather, I focused on what happens when a scientific community shares sacred values. A tribal moral community arises, one that actively suppresses ideas that are sacrilegious, and that discourages non-believers from entering. I argued that my field has become a tribal moral community, and the absence of conservatives (not just their underrepresentation) has serious consequences for the quality of our science. We rely on our peers to find flaws in our arguments, but when there is essentially nobody out there to challenge liberal assumptions and interpretations of experimental findings, the peer review process breaks down, at least for work that is related to those sacred values. (The great majority of work in social psychology is excellent, and is unaffected by these problems).

The fact that you criticized me without making an effort to understand me is not surprising. That is common in the blogosphere (although I rarely see it among philosophers). Rather, what sets you apart from all other bloggers who are members of the academy is what you did next. You accused me of professional misconduct—lying, essentially–and you speculated as to my true motive:

I suspect that Haidt is either an incompetent psychologist (not likely) or is disingenuously saying the sort of things controversial enough to get him in the New York Times (more likely).

As far as I can tell your evidence for these accusations is that my argument was so bad that I couldn’t have believed it myself. Here is how you justified your accusations:

A serious social scientist doesn’t go around crying out discrimination just on the basis of unequal numbers. If that were the case, the NBA would be sued for discriminating against short people, dance companies against people without spatial coordination, and newspapers against dyslexics. Claims of discrimination are sensibly made only if one has a reasonable and detailed understanding of the causal factors behind the numbers. We claim that women and minorities are discriminated against in their access to certain jobs because we can investigate and demonstrate the discriminating practices that result in those numbers. Haidt hasn’t done any such thing. He simply got numbers and then ran wild with speculation about closeted libertarians. It was pretty silly of him, and down right irresponsible of Tierney to republish that garbage without critical comment.

I have two responses to you.

First, please tell me if you would agree or disagree with this claim about when a member of the academy should accuse a peer of professional misconduct:

Accusations of professional misconduct are sensibly made only if one has a reasonable and detailed understanding of the facts of the case, and can bring forth evidence of misconduct. Pigliucci has made no effort to acquire such an understanding, nor has he presented any evidence to support his accusation. He simply took one claim from the Tierney article and then ran wild with speculation about Haidt’s motives. It was pretty silly of him, and down right irresponsible of Pigliucci to publish that garbage without even knowing what Haidt said.

Second, I challenge you to watch the video of my talk (click here) and then either

1) Retract your blog post and apologize publicly for calling me a liar

or

2) State on your blog that you stand by your original post.

If you do stand by your post, even after hearing my argument, then the world can decide for itself which of us is right, and which of us best models the ideals of science, philosophy, and the Enlightenment which you claim for yourself in the header of your blog, “Rationally Speaking.”

Jonathan Haidt

[Note: Pigliucci has now responded to me. He offers no apology, no retreat, no qualification of any of his original claims. He stands fully behind his original post.  My final response to him is here.]

Posted in Uncategorized | 22 Comments »

Are liberals more neurotic than conservatives?

February 11th, 2011 by Ravi Iyer

At our recent meeting of social psychologists, I had a few conversations about a particular facet of our data, the fact that liberals in our dataset score higher on measures of neuroticism than conservativism.  The effect in our data is small, but not insignificant (d=.24 of the standard deviation).  This surprised some people in that there is a fair amount of research about conservatives being fearful that people are aware of, even as there is some contradictory evidence.  A recent meta-analysis + study yielded mixed results, with some research and samples showing liberals as being more neurotic (including the lone non-student sample, though with a very small effect size), and some research showing conservatives as being more neurotic.  One conclusion might be that this is all statistical noise.  An alternative possibility is that it depends on the types of questions being asked or that it depends on the group being sampled.  I thought I’d explore this in our yourmorals data.

First, you can see that within the yourmorals dataset, liberals appear more neurotic than conservatives regardless of the question that is asked.

This even extends to asking about symptoms in the recent past.  The questions here are how often the participant has experienced “Being suddenly scared for no reason”, “Spells of terror or panic”, or “Feeling fearful” in the past 7 days, though the effect is tiny.

It appears that the effect is robust across questions.  Our sample is not representative of the broader US, but in this instance, this may be instructive.  Liberals may be more neurotic than conservatives within certain groups.  Our data is a large enough sample that it likely represents a sizable group of people, and it is possible that there is something peculiar to the kind of people who visit yourmorals that makes our liberals more neurotic than our conservatives.   As a broader test of this idea, I thought I’d examine those participants who visit yourmorals from sites like the New York Times or Edge, versus those who find yourmorals.org via search engines (e.g. searching for ‘morality quiz’), with the idea that the NY Times and Edge readers are more like our core audience (people especially interested in social science).

Here is the graph by question for those who find us via search engines:

And here is the graph for those who find us via the New York Times and Edge.org.

It may be self-evident from the graphs, but put another way, the correlation between neuroticism and liberal-conservative identification (1-7) is -.03 (n=1634, p=.22) for those who find us via search engines, -.08 (n=7129, p<.001) in New York Times readers, and -.13 (n=2382, p<.001) for those who find us via Edge.org.  Overall, the correlation is -.08 (n=35,793, p<.001).

To me, this supports the idea that there is something peculiar about the kind of liberal that reads the New York Times or visits Edge.org or a site like YourMorals.org.  Perhaps the common thread here is the idea that these are people who are searching for answers in life.  It somewhat converges with this paper by Napier & Jost, where they find that liberals are less happy than conservatives, a finding that replicates in our data and has been found by others, and they found that this relationship is explained by the liberal un-acceptance of inequality.  It seems somewhat implausible that liberals walk around consciously thinking about inequality a lot.  But perhaps the inability to accept inequality is part of a general questioning of the way things are and what the larger meaning of things is, which inevitably leads to anxiety about why things are not ‘better’.  I cannot show that with data, but I can say that, as a liberal, this rings true for me.  My search for meaning and desire to create change inevitably lead me to anxiety producing situations when I try to swim against a tide.  And yet it’s a tradeoff I continue to be willing to make.

– Ravi Iyer

Posted in differences between republicans and democrats, neuroticism, political psychology, yourmorals.org | 7 Comments »

Haidt’s Response to Krugman

February 10th, 2011 by Jonathan Haidt

I recently gave a talk on the need for ideological diversity in social psychology. John Tierney wrote an article for the New York Times describing the talk, titled “Social Scientist Sees Bias Within.” Paul Krugman wrote a dismissive response in his blog, Conscience of a Liberal. His 2 main points were 1) Ideological differences are not like race differences, because people can CHOOSE to adopt a different ideology (which I presume means that it’s OK to discriminate against them, even though ideology is in fact quite heritable)  and  2) Under-representation of any group in any field does not imply discrimination, which is a point I made explicitly in my talk. I fully agree with him that “doing head counts is a terrible way to assess” bias.

I posted a response on his blog, but because my response was #287 out of 310, nobody is likely to see it. I reprint it here:

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Dear Mr. Krugman:
I urge you to view the video and/or transcript of my talk at www.JonathanHaidt.com.
I very deliberately did NOT make the moral argument that ideological divides are like racial divides. I agree with you that there are many relevant differences. Also, I directly stated that personality differences will always guarantee that academe is mostly liberal, just as you noted that the military is mostly conservative. That’s all fine by me.
Rather, I focused my appeal to my colleagues one one point: that when conservatives are entirely absent (as opposed to simply underrepresented), then there is NOBODY to speak up, nobody to challenge predominant ideas, and our science suffers. I gave examples of several scientific mistakes that my fellow social psychologists make because our shared values make it difficult for us to entertain alternative hypotheses. People who think of such alternatives dare not speak up.
My research, like so much research in social psychology, demonstrates that we humans are experts at using reasoning to find evidence for whatever conclusions we want to reach. We are terrible at searching for contradictory evidence. Science works because our peers are so darn good at finding that contradictory evidence for us. Social science — at least my corner of it — is broken because there is nobody to look for contradictory evidence regarding sacralized issues, particularly those related to race, gender, and class. I urged my colleagues to increase our ideological diversity not for any moral reason, but because it will make us better scientists. You do not have that problem in economics where the majority is liberal but there is a substantial and vocal minority of libertarians and conservatives. Your field is healthy, mine is not.
Do you think I was wrong to call for my professional organization to seek out a modicum of ideological diversity?

Jonathan Haidt

Posted in partisanship, Uncategorized | 31 Comments »

Tea for Two: The Split Personality of the Tea Party

February 9th, 2011 by Sean Wojcik

Prior to November’s midterm elections, I blogged about the moral and psychological predictors of support for the Tea Party movement.  Overall, their pattern of responses on the Moral Foundations Questionnaire closely resembled the pattern found for conservatives.  That is, they reported a relatively equal reliance on the foundations of Harm, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority, and Purity when making moral judgments—unlike libertarians, who typically show weaker endorsements of all five foundations.  Additionally, Tea Party supporters reported high moral sensitivity to economic (but not lifestyle) liberty, and conceptualized fairness as equity/proportionality rather than as equality.

Although the movement’s political identity is still developing, Tea Party supporters’ scores on all of these moral foundations predicted a relatively coherent set of political attitudes.  Their strong moral valuations of both economic liberty and equity/proportionality are consistent with the movement’s core economic principles, and their low reliance on lifestyle liberty is consistent with the traditionally conservative viewpoints we observed across almost all social issues.

However, caution should be exercised before labeling the Tea Party as the rebranded base of traditional conservatism.  All of the above analyses were conducted with YourMorals visitors who indicated strong support for the Tea Party movement.  More recent data that we’ve collected in the past few months indicates that individuals who actually attend Tea Party rallies and events (under 30% of supporters in our data) show a strikingly different set of moral values than those described above.

Consider the following graph of the Moral Foundations Questionnaire.  Here, individuals who attended Tea Party events are clearly distinct from conservatives, endorsing all five foundations at low levels, just like true libertarians.

We already know that Tea Party supporters highly value economic liberty, but not lifestyle liberty.  However, those who actually attend Tea Party events appear to value both forms of liberty, much like true libertarians.

Do these moral sensitivities to both kinds of liberty predict specific attitudes toward social policies?  The answer appears to be yes.  Compared to conservatives, those who attend Tea Party events are more likely to support policies that enhance lifestyle liberty, including the choice to have an abortion, the legalization of marijuana, same-sex marriage, and favoring immigration.

Why might those who attend Tea Party events differ from the majority of its supporters on these key political issues?  One explanation is that the Tea Party movement is not, and never has been, a monolithic entity.  Instead, we see somewhat of a “split” personality.  The movement’s emphasis on its economic philosophy—rather than its largely undefined social philosophy—has facilitated the union of a core group of true libertarians with a growing base of traditionally conservative supporters.  Because this young political movement is still developing, it will be interesting to watch and see if/how continued growth may influence the future of the Tea Party’s morality, and which side of this “split” personality will emerge from the Tea Party’s moral mind.

Sean Wojcik

Posted in conservatives, equality, equity, fairness, libertarians, moral foundations, moral psychology, political ideology, political psychology, social psychology, yourmorals.org | 5 Comments »
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You can’t put out a Fire with Gasoline – A Reaction to reactions to the Giffords Shooting

January 11th, 2011 by Ravi Iyer

For the past few months, I have been working with Matt Motyl and Jon Haidt on a website that promotes research based methods for increasing civility in politics.  The desire to increase civility in politics is not new, having been parodied as the cliche-d dream of PhD Poli Sci students and recently promoted by Jon Stewart’s Rally to Restore Sanity, but it has obviously been taken to a new level with the tragic shooting of congresswoman Gabriel Giffords and many others, with politicians on both the left and the right, calling for a less heated atmosphere.

Predictably, the response to the shooting has taken on a partisan tinge, with each side claiming that Loughner, the shooter, is a far-right activist, evidenced by his interest in Ayn Rand, or a far-left activist, evidenced by his interest in the Communist Manifesto.  More indirectly, those on the left have blamed the right for their militant rhetoric, while those on the right have pointed out that the left sometimes uses similar rhetoric.

Some on the left have pointed out that the use of extreme rhetoric is unbalanced, and while I don’t think this is necessarily wrong, I think it is a mistake to focus upon, especially for liberals and those who want less divisiveness in politics.  It sets up an “us vs. them” dynamic at a time when all leaders, including Republicans that are sometimes characterized as obstructionist, are open to unity.

Have you ever noticed that liberal churches often have the word ‘unity’ in their title?  That conservatives want to solve health care by increasing competition across state lines?  That liberals prefer diplomatic, while conservatives prefer military solutions to conflicts?  Doesn’t it seem as if Fox News sees purportedly unbiased (e.g. NPR is run by fascists) and moderate (e.g. the Rally to Restore Sanity) entities as greater existential threats than the more obviously opposed, MSNBC?

Liberalism is congruent with cooperation, while conservativism is oriented toward competition.  In social science, linguist George Lakoff shows how conservatives use the language of competition.  In psychology, Morton Deutch’s considerable work was inspired by the difference between competitive and cooperative systems and his work can be explicitly connected to liberal-conservative differences.  Consider the below YourMorals data showing that liberals feel less warm towards sports fans than conservatives.

Neither cooperation or competition is inherently superior as there are situations where each is needed.  Sometimes war is the only way to prevent injustice (e.g. stopping Hitler) or competition does lead to greater productivity (e.g. capitalism vs. communism).  However, competitive framing  and divisiveness is likely to increase both conservativism and vitriolic rhetoric (see this page on how competition leads to incivility) and most Americans now say that, at least in politics, competition for office has gotten out of hand, at the expense of cooperation on policy and now at the expense of innocent lives.    We are in a moment when moderates on both sides of the aisle are preaching unity and civility, which should naturally lead to less divisiveness, threatening to marginalize extremists on both sides.  If there is anything that the killer’s reading list is indicative of, it is of extremism, not any particular political view. As such, those liberals who are using these events to specifically attack conservative rhetoric, further polarizing debate, are fighting a fire with gasoline.

– Ravi Iyer

ps. if you are interested, here is Jon Haidt’s reaction to these events.

Posted in civil politics, civility, gabriel giffords, hypermoralism, incivility, jon stewart, news commentary, yourmorals.org | 1 Comment »

Tony Hsieh, liberals, and libertarians prefer buying experiences to materialism – A Review of Delivering Happiness

December 19th, 2010 by Ravi Iyer

I recently finished Tony Hsieh’s book, Delivering Happiness, which is partially a business book, detailing his remarkable story where he has won (selling Link Exchange to Microsoft in his 20s for $265 million) and lost (selling almost everything to turn Zappos around) fortunes.  Zappos, an online shoe seller, has gone on to become the model for online retailers and was acquired by Amazon for almost a billion dollars.

However, Tony Hsieh’s book is clearly about something more than business.  I recently saw him speak at the Miliken Institute in Los Angeles and the last 10 minutes of his talk could have been from a class we teach at USC, the Science of Happiness.  In fact, I think the introduction to that series of slides was entitled the Science of Happiness and Delivering Happiness has a healthy dose of psychological research on happiness in it.  His basic thesis is that if he makes his employees happy, they will in turn be able to authentically make customers happy, which will allow Zappos’ brand, which is all about “WOW”-ing consumers (and suppliers actually).  For example, Zappos surprise upgrades shipping for customers and tries to pay for dinner when dining with suppliers, who normally have to woo their clients.  Zappos actively seeks to hire and fire employees based on their 10 core values, in order to maintain a happy harmonious workforce that can deliver happiness.

Hsieh gives a very succinct view of happiness/positive psychology research in his talks in a far more interesting manner than most psychologists, but there is one bit of new research that I bet he would be interested in.  Specifically, more and more research is showing that people who buy experiences are happier than people who buy objects.  In the book itself, Hsieh explicitly talks about his preference for experiences over objects.

From p.76 & p.106 respectively –

“ever since selling linkexchange, I’d committed to living by the philosophy that experiences were much more important to me than material things.  Most people assumed that I would have gone out and bought a fancy and expensive car, but I was content with my Acura Integra.”

(re: visiting Africa when it might not be financially the best decision) – “For me, summiting the tallest mountain of a continent was one of those things that I wanted to check off my list of things to do at some point in my life.  It went with my life philosophy of valuing experiences over things.”

In collaboration with Ryan Howell and Paulina Pchelin at San Francisco State, we’ve been developing a measure of experiential buying.  In validating that measure, we’ve found that happiness->less materialistic values->experiential buying->more happiness.  Conversely, neuroticism->more materialistic values->less experiential buying->less happiness.  The simple correlational pattern indicated that those who were more approach oriented were more experiential, while those who are more avoidance oriented are more materialistic in terms of the purchasing styles.

I’ve since extended this model in looking at the relationship between values and experiential buying.  Consider the below graph and notice that liberals (in blue) prefer experiences over possessions compared to conservatives (in red), who value experiences and possessions more equally.  Libertarians also prefer experiences to possessions.

Liberals and Libertarians prefer to buy Experiences vs. Objects

In further analysis, these differences were mediated fully by differences in values between liberals and conservatives.  Specifically, liberals valued experiences due to their valuation of stimulation (using the Schwartz Values Scale), while conservatives’ relative preference for material objects was mediated by endorsement of power.  I subsequently experimentally manipulated values by having participants recall a low or high power situation (based on the idea that people of low power will seek power and work by Dacher Keltner that high power->stimulation).  Sure enough, having people recall low power situations leads to more materialistic buying, while recalling high power situations leads to more experiential buying (preliminary graph below).


These results mirror what Tony Hsieh talks about concerning his values.  He is a more approach than avoidant oriented, per this quote from p.103:

My plan was to take almost everything that I had left in my name and liquidate it in a fire sale.  I would bet the farm and put all the proceeds into Zappos.

And he thought of his possessions as a means toward stimulation, rather than power or security.  From p.115…

selling the party loft symbolized the end of an era for me. It was hard not to feel wistful and nostalgic.  The loft had created so many experiences and memories for so many people.

Of course, it’s easier to think about stimulation rather than power, when you’ve made millions in your 20s.  But perhaps it explains some of the Zappos culture which includes approach/stimulation oriented statements like “Embrace and Drive Change”, “Create Fun and a Little Weirdness”, “Be Adventurous, Creative, and Open-Minded”, and “Pursue Growth and Learning”.  One of Zappos’ core values (“Be Humble”) seems almost the opposite of power.  Perhaps the key to Zappos’ success is that its culture is conducive to selling shoes as experiences, rather than possessions.

– Ravi Iyer

Posted in book reviews, consilience, differences between republicans and democrats, positive psychology, tony hsieh, yourmorals.org, zappos | No Comments »

The Case for Honesty as a Moral Foundation

December 8th, 2010 by Ravi Iyer

I was immediately attracted to Moral Foundation Theory (MFT) due to the utility of breaking down partisan and policy differences into questions of what one values.  The idea that different people believe in different moral principles is one of those obvious ideas that is yet still under appreciated in every day life, where we attribute differences to ignorance, stupidity, or evil, rather than to underlying value differences.

However, I have never been convinced that there are specifically five foundations or even that the idea of thinking of moral concerns as categorically ‘foundational’ is better than thinking of them in some other less categorical way.  Fortunately, those that originally conceived of Moral Foundations Theory do not require such homogenous thinking and even welcome the idea that the five foundation model is likely to undergo changes.  I have outlined a few changes I would make previously, as well as the criteria that one might use to posit a new moral category.  Even if one does not believe in the categorical distinction that some moral concerns are ‘foundations’, while others are not, it would seem clear that some moral concerns are more common, distinct, and important.  I would now like to make that case for honesty.

Honesty is common.

One of the distinctive traits of MFT is the evolutionary focus.  People moralize various things (e.g. eating pork or driving while using a cellphone) in various cultures, but the purpose is to identify those moral concerns that appear cross-culturally and have an innate quality.  Innate, in this instance, means “organized ahead of experience”, such that people can make intuitive judgments beyond their socialization.  Put more concretely, if concern about honesty is innate and universal, one might expect individuals to be able to intuitively signal and detect honesty in others, as this study, where participants are fairly successful in figuring out who will cooperate or cheat, shows.  The idea that concern about honesty is universal enough that one might posit an evolutionary story is almost self-evident, but this paper provides evolutionary models about how honesty might evolve.  If one subscribes to the evolution of groups that out-compete other groups, one can witness the evolution of honesty in modern society as nations that have low levels of corruption tend to have better economies than countries with high levels of corruption, mirroring the evolutionary processes theorized.

Honesty is distinct.

The same paper I cited above has some evidence for this, but from the perspective of Moral Foundations Theory, it would be useful to show that honesty is distinct from other moral concerns.  We asked users on YourMorals 4 questions about honesty (alpha=.69, .76 if we remove the relevance question) in addition to the standard Moral Foundations Questionnaire that measures the existing five foundational concerns.  Factor analyses tell the same story, but examining the correlations tells the story more simply.  Specifically, the highest correlation between endorsement of honesty and any other foundation is .31 (with Purity), while all other foundations have fairly high inter-correlations with other foundations (e.g. Purity/Authority/Ingroup inter-correlate >.5, Harm/Fairness inter-correlation = .57).  Concern about honesty is empirically distinct from other moral concerns.

Honesty is important.

The pragmatic utility of using the moral foundations to predict ideological differences is perhaps the primary contribution of MFT to date.  Are questions about honesty also pragmatically useful?

On a 7 point scale, those who are more conservative endorse questions about honesty more than those who are liberal, but the amount of variance in political attitudes predicted by endorsement of honesty is smaller, though significant, compared to other foundations (beta = .10 vs. other foundations which range from .12 (ingroup) to .33 (purity)).  However, if we look at economic conservatism, we do find that endorsing honesty does predict identification as being economically conservative (beta = .13) as well as authority, ingroup & purity concerns (betas = .10, .09, &.11).

I looked at some political attitude variables and the predictive power of endorsing honesty was not impressive.  However, endorsement of honesty is a strong negative predictor (in a regression equation, including the other five foundations) of psychopathy (beta = -.23) and utilitarianism (beta = -.26, e.g. willingness to sacrifice one life to save five others).  Measurement of endorsement of honesty may have important pragmatic utility, but not for political outcomes.

– Ravi Iyer

Posted in honesty, moral foundations, yourmorals.org | 6 Comments »
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