The Case of the Missing Conservative Social Psychologists
3rd March 2011
Will Wilkinson is on the case.
University of Virginia professor of psychology Jonathan Haidt (rhymes with “kite”) recently argued in a keynote address at a conference of social psychologists that his field and theirs, a strongly left-leaning discipline that specializes in detecting prejudice and discrimination invisible to the untrained eye, may be itself guilty of subtle bigotry. After all, Haidt asked, shouldn’t there be some conservative social psychologists? At least a few? (A show of hands at Haidt’s lecture revealed just three self-described conservatives among about 1000 assembled psychologists.) The statistical improbability of this near-total absence of conservatives in social psychology suggests that the discipline may be less-than-welcoming to young Republicans.
I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.
But, of course, it is by no means clear that ethics or social justice are the sort of things about which there are truths at all, much less the kind of truths accessible by impartial inquirers employing standard scientific methods. In any case, scientists have, let us say, a checkered record in this regard. From the dawn of the 20th century through the 1930s many of America’s most eminent progressive scientists were enthusiastic eugenicists. And not a few of last century’s “best minds in science” were advocates of communism–a system of “intergroup relations” that that killed upwards of 100 million people. Does Jost suppose that the political consensus of those more recently socialized into the scientific community should be assumed to be less disastrously misguided because science has at long last uncovered the truth about ethics? Did I miss the write-up in Scientific American?
Do tell.