Actually, you have this almost perfectly reversed. The split is least pronounced in the (empirical) physical sciences, and wider the more you move away from that. By the time you get to the Humanities, the ratio is often 10-1 or the like. Social Psychology is much closer to the Humanities than it is Physics, so the findings are not surprising.
For plenty of people, their political beliefs are their religion.
Could you define for me which sciences are empirical and which are not?
Then you should offer your post as some sort of WAG instead of a fact or even a decent, tested result stemming from a hypothesis.
Fair point.
I’ve noted above that my bias is irrelevant here.
I suspect that you may also be extrapolating from your own arena.
You live and learn. Read statements by people in the field, published articles, testimony at commissions etc.
You can read up a little on evidence based practice in psychology.
See also, a couple of articles in the NYT, e.g. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E02E4D7163EF93AA35750C0A9629C8B63&scp=2&sq=For+psychotherapy+skeptic&st=cse&pagewanted=all & http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/10/science/for-psychotherapy-s-claims-skeptics-demand-proof.html?scp=1&sq=For+psychotherapy+skeptic&st=cse&pagewanted=all
The media translates to “the public at large” and is enormously influential. I don’t believe the influence fails to extend to science.
BTW, for an interesting example of PC backlash against a psychologist with unpopular opinions, you might read Criticism of a Gender Theory, and a Scientist Under Siege
That’s not correlation without cause. That’s correlation and cause but with no conclusive evidence.
What does bias have to do with thinking of a way to subtract all other factors? ISTM you’re being cute here.
What constitutes a “conservative viewpoint”? I have to call bullshit on this. I had more conservative professors in college than liberals. I’m not buying for a second that the poor widdle conservatives are being perecuted by evil liberals in academia. What a steaming pile. Did you get that from watching Ben Stein’s creationism movie or something?
No, but I think to think that you can overcome this bias - or that as a practical matter you are doing so - is naive.
Oddly, later in the same post you acknowledge at length that I am correct about this very point, including the fact that it’s obviously so, and offer up new defenses, namely that 1) all science is afflicted by this problem, and 2) it’s the best we can do. I’ll get to that below, but in light of that it’s hard to figure out what you’re doing.
I don’t know why you keep going on about rubric.
That’s very nice. What I’m doing here is pointing out a specific bias that exists in a specific field of science and noting that this specific bias would have an impact on this specific field on issues which relate to this bias. Seems pretty simple, really, but worth doing because it might not be obvious to a lot of people, and apparently isn’t, based on the responses to this thread.
I think this gets at what gets the dander of you and people like you - you feel that science is under attack. Rest assured that this is not the case and I don’t really disagree with what you’ve written here, other than your ever present rubric jive.
No, but I think skepticism of certain conclusions would be warranted. That’s all I’ve been saying throughout, your incessant harping about my rubric notwithstanding.
My point here is that the interest of psychologists are skewed relative to “the interests of their times”.
That was meant as a descriptor, i.e. “The split is least pronounced in the physical sciences, which are empirical.”
Obviously, no science is completely bias-free, but I think it’s pretty obvious that people working in physics/chemistry/engineering are working with cold, hard facts in a way that the humanities are not. “Social Sciences” fall somewhere in-between.
Of course no power on the face of the planet can move you from your position, I know. Because if it happened to you, it must be the Universal Experience of Everyone.
But other readers may profit by the following links that answer your request:
One:
Two:
Four:
Six:
I read the article in the Times last night, and the group under consideration are social psychologists, who are probably more liberal and more self selecting for being liberal than psychologist on the whole. I don’t know if their work has the same level of rigor as the work I’m familiar with does. There is also a lot more self selection.
To have a real bias situation you need both statistical data (which we have here) and at least some instances of discrimination. I know there are such self-reported instances. However, a creationist would no doubt feel very discriminated against by a biology department. Someone who holds positions very much different from the majority of those working in the field is going to have a tough whether or not there is politics involved - unless they have very strong data backing them up. I don’t know if that is the case here or not, since this is a branch of psychology.
My brother has a BA degree in family planning of all things. I doubt there were many devout Catholic teachers or students in his classes. Discrimination?
No doubt. My psychology professor in college was the biggest flaming liberal I’ve ever met.
Rubric is a term used in teaching as guidelines for assessment. If you need a new term because it bugs you so much then criterion works too.
How about you come up with a system for preventing bias in research. You proposed “Essentially, any time the mainstream view is aligned with a left-wing viewpoint, there is room to question whether this is the result of unbiased scientific study or simply a reflection of the fact that people tend to find support for things they already believe (or prefer to).” Please spend some actual time defending how this proposal improves on the methodology I naively support. You act like the method failed a long time ago or something and everybody knows that by now.
I acknowledged a type of bias based on my experience with the behavioral sciences. You, on the hand, were completely nonspecific at first but your proposed criterion is specific. Subsequently, you have fixated on a type of bias that is unavoidable while working hard to ignore that fact that your proposed criterion is specific to the design and analysis of experiments.
Science and its results are always under attack. That’s the point of it. What bugs me is when people want to politicize the process. I don’t like it when scientists do it and I don’t like it when laymen do it. I also don’t like it when people attempt to smear an entire field with criticisms based on something they cannot specifically describe.
You proposed the criterion. You shouldn’t have proposed it and discussed what you are actually interested in. You proposed that criterion, managed to show that the usage of such a criterion reflects intellectually lazy cowardice, and then fixated on a completely different type of bias which your criterion does not address.
You really crack me up though. So now you are proposing skepticism. That’s really excellent, you just stumbled upon lesson #2 in every research methods class. So far you have: lesson #1: Scientists have research interests that are biased by their times, and lesson #2: Scientists should be skeptical. I really hope your next post stumbles on lesson #3 (hint - it start with an “e” and ends in “thics”)
So propose something to do about it other than labeling results as being politically left or right wing. You have brought nothing that is not already a central concern to scientists from any field.
Have you ever actually seen a psychology paper? Does Bob Newhart define psychologist for you? I’m an engineer, and have read, reviewed and edited more papers than I can recall. My daughter is an academic psychologist. Her studies, and the data analysis of her results, is more rigorous than anything I’ve seen in my branch of engineering. She has read me reviewer comments on her papers, and it seems reviewers don’t let methodological sloppiness get by.
Someone in her department had his work picked up by the press, and I assure you that the coverage no more reflects the actual limitations described in the studies and papers than does coverage of string theory.
She is not a social psychologist, so I don’t have first hand information on what their papers are like, but I doubt that papers published in top journals contain the kind of hand waving you seem to think they do.
BTW, anyone who thinks that “Social Science” has a universally left wing bias should check out the University of Chicago Economics Department some day. But the right wing bias of many of the professors does not affect the mathematical rigor of their papers, and only a fool would accuse them of hand waving.
I’ll be an anecdote.
I went to grad school, and then served as an adjunct, at one of the largest universities in the country. I wouldn’t say I experienced any overt discrimination per se, but there were plenty of times where I was made well aware that my non-liberal ideas put me out of step. At one time I intended to pursue a humanities PhD; I elected not to, and part of the reason was that an already-difficult academic job market would be made worse by my not being orthodox.
My personal experience totally proves everything I say is 100% true.
I have no dog in this fight, but thought this might be relevant (and I actually learned about it in Prof. Bailey’s class!):
:rolleyes:
Strawman much?
Yes, I’ve read academic psychology papers, and some of them are quite empirical, especially when they are oriented towards neurobiology. Some branches are less so, such as social psychology. Taken as a whole, the social sciences are comparatively less empirical than the physical sciences. In many cases, this is just a function of time: physics has been around for millennia, social science in most cases less than 200 years. In many cases, such as macroeconomics, there is a severe issue of data shortage.
The “handwaving” is your creation.
That’s OK, I know what it means. What bugs me about it is that I’ve said a fairly simple thing and you’ve misrepresented it in a convoluted manner, using terminology that is unfamiliar to many people.
No.
It improves by having people better assess the strength of various consensus views.
I would have thought this was obvious.
Again, you persist in ignoring the specifics of what I’ve said in favor of attacking what you perceive as some broad approach. Stick with what I’ve actually said.
How do you like it when laymen point out that scientists do it? Not very much, apparently. But it can’t be avoided, if it’s true. Sorry.
I’ve been extremely consistent throughout this thread. The sum of my words, in the OP to this thread were:
“ISTM that this has significant relevance when discussing the mainsteam position or consensus of professionals in the field of psychology, when the issue touches on political or PC issues. Essentially, any time the mainstream view is aligned with a left-wing viewpoint, there is room to question whether this is the result of unbiased scientific study or simply a reflection of the fact that people tend to find support for things they already believe (or prefer to).”
I’ve not varied from this. What has varied is your meandering about rubrics and your worship of the scientific method etc. But that’s just you.
Again, I’m pointing to a specific type of bias in a specific field, which would call for a specific skepticism. And FWIW, I’m saying lay people should also be skeptical.
Do you mind clarifying what you mean by this?
i’m proposing being skeptical of consensus views that align with the political viewpoint of the vast majority of scholars in a particular field. That’s what should be done about it.
How do you define empirical? Is a paper analyzing data from an extensive study empirical or not? Your post was of the “Social Science is not real science” flavor.
Dealing with people certainly introduces additional variables, since you don’t have to correct for the socioeconomic status of a muon. But biology, usually considered a harder science, has those issues also.
“Provable or verifiable by experience or experiment” will do.
It does not mean “good” or “better.”
Sure, the data analysis is empirical. “Girls in the study were observed to play with dolls more, and boys with guns” is a wholly empirical statement. Interpreting that data and figuring out why they did so is a far, far more difficult task, with an exceptionally high number of variables.
And there’s your problem. Stop looking for flavors and stick with what people say.
More importantly, particles and chemicals are not sentient creatures. We pretty well understand what carbon is and what it does, and thus can predict how it will interact with other chemicals under given conditions. If need be, we can experiment repeatedly.
We only imperfectly understand how humans work, let alone how multiple humans interact in vary circumstances, and experimentation on human subjects faces all sorts of practical constraints.