I'm not exactly sure what social psychologists do. (Their work doesn't come up all that much in intellectually lively circles.) Search out evidence of conformity and discrimination, I guess. So, as you would expect from the Law of Projection, it turns out that social psychologists are so conformist and discriminatory themselves that I can barely stay awake to finish typing this sentence about them. From Perspectives on Psychological Science:
Political Diversity in Social and Personality Psychology
Yoel Inbar and Joris Lammers
Tilburg University
Abstract
A lack of political diversity in psychology is said to lead to a number of pernicious outcomes, including biased research and active discrimination against conservatives. The authors of this study surveyed a large number (combined N = 800) of social and personality psychologists and discovered several interesting facts. First, although only 6% described themselves as conservative “overall,” there was more diversity of political opinion on economic issues and foreign policy. Second, respondents significantly underestimated the proportion of conservatives among their colleagues. Third, conservatives fear negative consequences of revealing their political beliefs to their colleagues. Finally, they are right to do so: In decisions ranging from paper reviews to hiring, many social and personality psychologists said that they would discriminate against openly conservative colleagues. The more liberal respondents were, the more they said they would discriminate.
Lee Jussim of Rutgers offers an amusing parody of "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack" in regard to Liberal Privilege in academia.
One of Robert Conquest's three laws of politics is "Everyone is conservative about what he knows best." Social psychologists must not know best about much.
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28 comments:
The more liberal respondents were, the more they said they would discriminate.
ouch
ideopolitics and fascism are bedbuggies
what's terrifying is that these people are 100 percent sure they're right, their minds are airtight... a combination of True Belief, arrogance and insecurity
identity politics slew academia, it's just nobody told the corpse that it's dead yet (apparently the corpse has tenure and cannot be educated)
these goose-steppers run college admins, too
These days for fear of being blackballed one daren't call a spade a spade.
Which reminds me of an ancient joke about the prim Mother Superior who emerged from her convent and complained to the foreman of the public works crew who were making a disturbing racket as they tore up the pavement just outside the chapel:
"I understand that the jackhammers cannot be muffled," the Mother Superior said, "but do you think you could ask your workmen to try to keep their voices down?"
"I dunno, Sister," the foreman said, "these are regular guys, salt of the earth - you know, the kind of guys who call a spade a spade."
"Oh no they don't," the nun said, "They call it a 'fucking shovel.'"
jonathan haidt is an outstanding researcher, author & academic in this area & is the only social psychologist worth his salt. i recommend his "the righteous mind" book, any podcast on which he is interviewed, & any of his research articles. also his websites yourmorals.org & righteousmind.org
i recommend his work without reservation. panjoomby (ex-academic)
The same is true in medicine by the way.
One of Robert Conquest's three laws of politics is "Everyone is conservative about what he knows best."
Of course. Change devalues knowledge.
@Steve Sailer
"One of Robert Conquest's three laws of politics is "Everyone is conservative about what he knows best."
Since you feel like posting quotes today, here is a quote from someone MUCH smarter than Robert Conquest:
"Not all conservatives are stupid, but all stupid people are conservative."
- John Stuart Mill
What I find amusing about your quote is that you make fun of liberals' intelligence. From my experience, the dumbest people that I have ever met in my life were all conservative. The intellectual superiority of liberals is simple unquestionable. Every time I see liberals and conservatives arguing about anything, the conservatives get brutally owned. Case in point: Richard Dawkins debating with the social conservative moron, Bill O'Reilly, over the teaching of Creationism at public schools. I actually started to feel bad for Bill O'Reilly. It was like watching a giant ogre caveman beating up a toddler with Down's Syndrome with a baseball bat. Dawkins ran leaps intellectually around O'Reilly and put him in his place so many time during the 10 minute debate that it was almost sad to watch. And don't even get me started on Rick Santorum and Sarah Palin. Conservatives are the dumbest people on the planet. The evidence is overwhelming. This probably explains why pretty much all of the most brilliant scientists and intellectuals are either liberal or libertarian, with almost none being socially conservative - many are economically conservative, but not on social issues.
The more liberal respondents were, the more they said they would discriminate.
If would be nice if we could stop calling these people "liberal" (which means "broad-minded: tolerant of different views and standards of behavior in others") and call them what they actually are instead, which is fascists.
"One of Robert Conquest's three laws of politics is "Everyone is conservative about what he knows best."
Since you feel like posting quotes today, here is a quote from someone MUCH smarter than Robert Conquest:
"Not all conservatives are stupid, but all stupid people are conservative."
- John Stuart Mill
What I find amusing about your quote is that you make fun of liberals' intelligence. From my experience, the dumbest people that I have ever met in my life were all conservative.
Well, judging by the obtuseness of this comment, you must be one of the stupid leftists. In the Conquest quote, "conservative" obviously doesn't mean "politically conservative". What he means is that people are resistant to change ("conservative") in areas where they have substantive knowledge.
So if you want to preen about how smart "liberals" are and how stupid "conservatives" are, it might help if you don't betray a notable inability to understand a simple text in your anecdotal diatribe on the matter.
Seems Conquest is MUCH smarter than you, champ.
If would be nice if we could stop calling these people "liberal" (which means "broad-minded: tolerant of different views and standards of behavior in others") and call them what they actually are instead, which is fascists.
Well, no. "Fascist" signifies beliefs that are significantly different from those of "leftists" (known as "liberals" in the US). The two groups do share a common belief in being repressive authoritarians/totalitarians.
Conservatives are the dumbest people on the planet. The evidence is overwhelming.
I don't think so.
I was a psychology undergraduate. When I considered graduate school I looked for a thesis topic. I thought about comparing the IQs of liberals and conservatives. That was not very original I discovered. There have been tens of thousands of students who looked into that topic. But no studies? Why?
If you conducted a valid study which showed that liberals are smarter than conservatives - trust me - you will get published. And it's not a very difficult study to conduct. The test instruments are stable and readily available.
So why are there no such studies?
The simple answer is that there are no IQ differences between leftists and rightists - if you measure the whole population.
There are very big differences among subgroups. For example, in a single factory the Democrats on the assembly line are certainly going to be intellectually inferior to the Republican upper management. But trial lawyers (all Democrat) are also smart. Most of the welfare recipients (very stupid) are also Democrats. Our political parties are composites of many groups and these groups may vary in intellectual capacity - but the aggregates don't - it all balances out.
Albertosaurus
Ray's right, it's nice to have it encapsulated in once sentence:
The more liberal respondents were, the more they said they would discriminate.
Liberals are bigots. This isn't just circumstance - it's baked into the liberal cake. Like the Puritans/Quakers/etc, if liberals get a chance to force distant people to live their way, they take it.
"Live and let live" (AKA, the idea of Freedom) is anathema to liberals.
"Not all conservatives are stupid, but all stupid people are conservative."
Dems have the black and brown vote all sewn up. I guess that means they're conservative!
"Not all conservatives are stupid, but all stupid people are conservative."
Dems have the black and brown vote all sewn up. I guess that means they're conservative!
What I find amusing about your quote is that you make fun of liberals' intelligence. From my experience, the dumbest people that I have ever met in my life were all conservative.
That's because you're a racist and only hang out with white people! You're missing out on all that dem black and brown diversity, man!
@Steve Sailer
Since you feel like posting quotes today, here is a quote from someone MUCH smarter than Robert Conquest:
"Not all conservatives are stupid, but all stupid people are conservative."
- John Stuart Mill
What I find amusing about your quote is that you make fun of liberals' intelligence. From my experience, the dumbest people that I have ever met in my life were all conservative. The intellectual superiority of liberals is simple unquestionable. Every time I see liberals and conservatives arguing about anything, the conservatives get brutally owned... Conservatives are the dumbest people on the planet.
Control your menses, you sub-130 iQ whippersnapper
"Not all conservatives are stupid, but all stupid people are conservative."
Sorry, but anyone who can actually live on Planet Earth and not see the evident truth that is HBD is more blinkered than any creationist.
The main stream media only ever use conservatives they can mock. I have no doubt the author of this blog could hold his own intellectually, but he'll never be given the chance.
Recently Britain's "greatest historian" Hobsbawm died. He was a Stalinist to his dying day, but that didn't stop him receiving millions in prizes and grants. He would have been shredded by Sarah Palin if Sarah Palin had ever been given the chance of debating with him.
Lefties control the debate. Get one in an academic department and you get more. They also have the advantage that, being ideologues, the know the answer to every question before they even start. This means they can publish more than those who take the trouble to think.
From my experience, the dumbest people that I have ever met in my life were all conservative. The intellectual superiority of liberals is simple unquestionable. Every time I see liberals and conservatives arguing about anything, the conservatives get brutally owned.
What a moron you are.
Tell you what, you put some of your "intellectual superiority" to work on figuring out to to give yourself a screen name. Once you've scaled that mighty hurdle we can "argue" about any topic you chose. You'll get humiliated. Again.
I suppose that's happened frequently in the past and is why you are currently shooting your mouth off as "Anonymous".
"Fascist" signifies beliefs that are significantly different from those of "leftists"
No, it doesn't.
If would be nice if we could stop calling these people "liberal" (which means "broad-minded: tolerant of different views and standards of behavior in others") and call them what they actually are instead, which is fascists.
I never know what to call people on the American left. They're not liberal or progressive. But "leftist" evokes, you know, some guy in a beret with an AK-47 running around the jungles in South America. So I settled on "lefties" eventually, which is still kind of lame but the best I can come up with.
"I suppose that's happened frequently in the past and is why you are currently shooting your mouth off as "Anonymous"."
I am on your side and you're right I have been behaving like a liberal and posting anonymously.
Greetings from NZ where there is never more than 2 degrees of separation between you and the rest of the population.
Second the Haidt recommendation. Every conservative should be familiar with his book The Righteous Mind. He is also a very engaging speaker. Used to be a liberal, now considers himself a moderate, and has a trenchant critique of liberal blindspots.
Liberals think they are smarter because they insulate themselves from people who would show them otherwise. It turns out that disagreeing with a liberal about most things is "offensive", it doesn't matter how politely you do so. A liberal is wont to say, "You can't make that argument because it hurts my feelings." You can see the sharp decline in reasoning when you overhear liberals talking to each other (or when they think you are liberal because you seem smart "like them").
Generally no better informed than conservatives, with the added disadvantage of arrogance that causes them to assume too much, about both themselves and the quality of their arguments.
" The intellectual superiority of liberals is simple unquestionable."
If a conservative had written this sentence, he would have been accused of being a moron who doesn't know the difference between an adverb and and adjective - " he must have been home schooled", " no, it is not a typo - he really is that stupid."
How does it feel?
Sorry, but anyone who can actually live on Planet Earth and not see the evident truth that is HBD is more blinkered than any creationist.
That's obviously true, but with respect to almost all other issues conservatives -- especially the conservative masses -- often really are incredibly stupid and stubborn. And I say that as someone who likes a lot about religion (and who'd even describe himself as somewhat religious) and who is appalled by ultra-liberal social degeneracy.
"Not all conservatives are stupid, but all stupid people are conservative."
Mill is more or less right: if, like most people, you're of average intelligence or less, you're well advised to stick to the tried and true ways, and not let yourself get seduced by visionary ideas, because you're not smart enough to evaluate them. This means you should generally take conservative positions.
Clever people are capable of generating visionary, reformist schemes, and believe themselves capable of evaluating them, so they tend to favour them, and in our culture visionary ideas tend to be leftist ideas. (Others may adopt a leftist outlook as a way of signalling high intelligence (to themselves and others), whether or not they are really intelligent.)
Of course, they're not really as good at evaluating them as they think. For one thing, value-laden choices are often made on a emotional basis. For another, what often refutes such are facts, and intellectuals are good at ignoring facts. Bruce Charlton coined the phrase "clever sillies" to describe people who use their high intelligence largely to fool themselves, and iSteve readers are aware of this phenomenon. Our landscape is littered with the weckage of clever, visionary ideas.
Mill himself was a bit of a clever silly. Being essentially a brain in a Petri dish, he was attracted to principles of maximal social tolerance, "experiments in living", etc., because someone like him could only benefit from loosening up. Applied to ordinary middle-class and working-class folk, not sexless intellectuals, the same principles are a disaster.
Cennbeorc
In reality, especially along the long road of human evolution, humans to struggle and survive dealt with raw realities, first, and then put upon them the best emotions they had that would fit the raw realities. Some folks have better emotions than others, of course, Psychologists, however, tend to live in bubble worlds wherein they find good emotions central and then try to join to them as much reality as will fit Too much won't. It is disregarded. Psychology ain't "all here" amd when push comes to shove, feel good ain't the litmus test about what is real or what might work. About 90% of psychologists are liberals, many neo-Marxists. You gotta be bright to lie to yourself successfully for very long.
I have spent my life in universities surrounded by people with high IQ's who would never consider themselves conservatives. I have degrees in one science and three languages and a PhD in Asian history.
Take it from me, universities are incredibly resistant to change and professors unleash a the cacophony of whinging if they are ever asked to adapt to altered circumstances. Drop them in the wilderness and they would starve. I would rather be with a B- geology student who was less obsessed with theory and had a little more practical experience.
Sorry again, but taken en bloc, liberals are not brighter or better than conservatives. They are theoretically gifted, but practically challenged and their supposedly high IQs are wasted on pure sophistry, convincing themselves that reality is not reality, but the result of some right-wing conspiracy.
They never stop congratulating themselves on their moral and intellectual superiority, but the petty infighting that characterises their personal lives has to be seen to be believed.
As has repeatedly be shown, the IQ profiles of liberal and conservative populations are different, but they average out to give similar figures.
Haidt once said the only conservative social psychologist he could think of was Philip Tetlock (author of "Expert Political Judgement", based on a pretty cool long-running experiment). Tetlock has said that he identifies as a classical liberal.
"Anonymous said...
'"Not all conservatives are stupid, but all stupid people are conservative."
- John Stuart Mill"'
Mill, if he indeed did write this (and I no longer take the word of progressives [like our Mr. Anonymous] on anything) he would have written it ~150 yrs ago.
The definition of a liberal and a conservative were quite different then, especially comparing a British liberalism of the mid-to-late 1800's vs. 21st Century American 'liberalism'.
A few examples of positions that Mill held at various points in his life, from Wikipedia:
"Mill argues that free discourse is a necessary condition for intellectual and social progress. We can never be sure, he contends, that a silenced opinion does not contain some element of the truth."
"Social liberty for Mill meant putting limits on the ruler's power so that he would not be able to use his power on his own wishes and make decisions which could harm society; in other words, people should have the right to have a say in the government's decisions."
"An influential advocate of freedom of speech, Mill objected to censorship."
" Mills also argued in support of freedom of speech on political grounds, stating that it is a critical component for a representative government to have in order to empower debate over public policy. Mill also eloquently argued that freedom of expression allows for personal growth and self-realization. He said that freedom of speech was a vital way to develop talents and realise a person's potential and creativity. He repeatedly said that eccentricity was preferable to uniformity and stagnation."
"Mill's early economic philosophy was one of free markets. However, he accepted interventions in the economy, such as a tax on alcohol, if there were sufficient utilitarian grounds. He also accepted the principle of legislative intervention for the purpose of animal welfare. Mill originally believed that "equality of taxation" meant "equality of sacrifice" and that progressive taxation penalised those who worked harder and saved more and was therefore "a mild form of robbery"
"...increased investment leads to increases in the wage fund and to economic progress."
"Mill supported the Malthusian theory of population. By population he meant the number of the working class only. He was therefore concerned about the growth in number of labourers who worked for hire. He believed that population control was essential for improving the condition of the working class so that they might enjoy the fruits of the technological progress and capital accumulation. He propagated birth control as against moral restraint."
Overall, these positions are definitely more representative of those held by 21st Century American conservatives, maybe even libertarians. Though the lefties like to talk loudly about supporting freedoms like free speech, in practice pretty much all they are interested in are controlling speech into carefully designated areas of their design, and suppressing through any means possible, anything that falls outside of it.
Sigh. The brain trust at iSteve is successfully trolled, once again.
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