As the second link pointed out, one of the studies under discussion found that during the peer review process, reviewers rejected papers with controversial findings because of “poor methodology” while accepting papers with identical methods if they supported the reviewers’ beliefs.
I quote I’ve shared here before, from Richard Feynman’s Caltech commencement address in 1974:
Of course, I’m not trying to say that air viscosity is just like racial discrimination. Neither was Richard Feynman. I’m saying instead that if we permit conclusions of science to be influenced by how we want things to be, we are creating untrustworthy conclusions.
I agree with them to the extent that we’re discussing the presence of barriers to entry in the field of social psychology and the potential deleterious effects to the accuracy and breadth of social psychology research.
I don’t necessarily agree or disagree with them about any other issues.
I see nothing persuasive in any of those quotes, and the first one that I repeated above is the only one where one might even reasonably try to put such a spin on it, but I see two big issues with it. The first is that in a scientific context I’d have a problem with any paper that was overtly ideological, regardless of what political viewpoint or ideology it was trying to promote. The second big problem with trying to allege anti-conservative bias is nicely summed up by this quote from the same article:
The N.Y.U. political psychologist John Jost … wrote, “Haidt fails to grapple meaningfully with the question of why nearly all of the best minds in science find liberal ideas to be closer to the mark with respect to evolution, human nature, mental health, close relationships, intergroup relations, ethics, social justice, conflict resolution, environmental sustainability, and so on.”
Jost’s comments deserve careful attention when discussing allegations of anti-conservative bias. It might help to understand them in a specific context like evolution or climate change. To take the latter example, the divide on climate change can be fairly accurately characterized as having, on one side, climate scientists and those who follow the science, and on the other side, conservative pundits and politicians and those who deny the science. Not all conservatives, to be sure, but it’s a position that’s become firmly associated with the conservative side of the political spectrum.
So if I see a paper or an op-ed on some aspect of climate change that comes from a staunchly conservative organization and/or is proselytizing a conservative ideology, am I going to have a “bias” against it? If by “bias” you mean am I going to consider its contents suspect until proven otherwise, I think it’s fair to say that failing to be suspicious when dealing with a persistent source of anti-science nonsense would be completely irrational. It would be like coming across some tattered guy sleeping on a park bench with a shopping cart of personal possession beside him and giving even odds on whether it’s a homeless bum or Bill Gates.
To reiterate Jost’s quote in the clearest possible terms, while we all have ideological positions and tend to reject opposing ones, it is nevertheless an important truth that one is not being “biased” if one is simply rejecting a demonstrable pack of lies.
As for your other “evidence”, the second just seems to be an example of ordinary confirmation bias and the third seems to be describing a flawed study, all of which problems I readily acknowledge but I fail to see the argument.
Again, I recommend that you actually read the article before discussing it.
The 800 reviewers had much less of a problem with the ideological paper with which they agreed.
So whether or not it is true how you would react, the reviewers didn’t. The rigor of the paper diidn’t change at all. But the reactions did, and it correlated strongly with whether or not the reviewers agreed with the findings.
I am not prejudiced against conservative political views, I used to hold them. I have abandoned them for reasons that I hold to be valid and well-considered.
In academic economics, views that might broadly be described as “Keynesian” have a high level of acceptance, views that might be described as “supply side” have not been so favored. This is not proof that conservative economic views suffer from a leftish prejudice against their implications. Point of fact, it is more reasonable to suggest that they have simply been found to be wanting.
This view is underscored and supported by the fact the Keynesian views have won their position by honest analysis and debate in the academic economic sector. Unless, of course, we would like to assume a massive lefty conspiracy to stack the academic sector with like minded academics. Outside of that specter of conspiracy, we are entirely justified in assuming and asserting that “supply side” economics failed because it ensuckens dead donkey balls.
I did read it. You, however, apparently didn’t even read my short post. I recommend that you actually read what I wrote before discussing it. I realize that you must be quite enamored of that quote since you’re repeating it for the second time after Bricker already quoted it and I already responded to it.
Repeating an irrelevant anecdote over and over again doesn’t really achieve anything. Aside from the fact that this anecdote illustrates the entirely unsurprising phenomenon of confirmation bias, as I already said – which is particularly unsurprising in the highly subjective and almost meaningless context in which it was evoked – I would also remind you that the original argument was supposed to be that conservatives are being discriminated against in universities. WTF does your silly anecdote even have to do with that? The entire article is about some alleged academic bias in social psychology (which as far as I’m concerned isn’t even a legitimate science) and has nothing whatsoever to do with what Bricker claimed.
No, the crisis is real. The idea that tenure shouldn’t exist is your peculiar world-view.
And it’s not underfunding “for tenure” that is the issue (whatever that was supposed to mean), it’s underfunding, period. “Tenure-track” positions is just a way of describing traditional full-time research faculty positions which historically are eligible for tenure. And these have been disappearing because underfunding is a fact:
Year by year, various federal data sets are released, and document the steady growth of adjunct positions and decline of tenure-track jobs in the academic work force.
In an attempt to draw more attention to these shifts over time, the American Federation of Teachers is today releasing a 10-year analysis of the data, showing just how much the tenure-track professor has disappeared. The overall number of faculty and instructor slots grew from 1997 to 2007, but nearly two-thirds of that growth was in “contingent” positions – meaning those off of the tenure track. Over all, those jobs increased from two-thirds to nearly three-quarters of instructional positions.
… “The deterioration of staffing has reached a crisis point when only a quarter are tenured or tenure-track.” https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/05/12/workforce
So instead of permanent tenured faculty doing research and teaching, you get the growing trend of having a horde of underpaid temporary and part-time staff thrown into teaching roles. The students are under-served, the temps have an uncertain future, and research doesn’t get done. Lose-lose-lose. But in Scott Walker World, it doesn’t get much better than that!
Your response was inadequate and did not address the point.
You claimed that you would have problems with any paper that was overtly ideological. The reviewers studied had far less “problems” with papers with whose ideology they agreed. So for them, it wasn’t “any” overtly ideological paper - it was only overtly ideological papers with which they disagreed. A double standard, IOW.
Not if you are going to ignore it.
It demonstrates how it happens.
Examples and evidence have a great deal to do with it. Of course, if you are going to wave your hands and say “just because it happens doesn’t mean anything” there is nothing to be done.
Sure. I agree that there is no bias in rejecting error.
To restate the first argument:
(1) There is a strong anti-conservative bias in the field of social psychology that
(2) Causes or contributes to the fact that the vast majority of social psychologists are liberal, because
(3) The conservative graduate student who is considering social psychology is discouraged by the hostility.
Secondly:
(1) The lack of a more evenly balanced cadre of social psychologists leads to science which fails to root out bias.
The posts I quoted inferentially support those arguments. They are evidence of it, although admittedly not conclusive evidence.
Do you agree that they are evidence, albeit non-conclusive?
Yes, in a sense. But how is that relevant? Was tenure a factor in Kipnis’ reprieve? Are you saying that someone without tenure would have suffered more onerous consequences in the Title IX investigation?
If your answer is, “No,” then how is the success relevant?
The story doesn’t mention whether he was on a tenure track and didn’t mention whether he tried in-house arbitration before he launched a lawsuit. (as far as I recal. Read it a couple days ago) lWithout knowing that I’d say it’s useless in proving any real point on the value of tenure.
You’re a grad student. You have lodged a complaint of rape against a professor in you department. He sues you for defamation and his suit is dismissed. After this dismissal another professor at your university publishes a paper that refers to this incident. In it she implies that you are lying and calls the whole business as ‘melodrama’. You inform her of your side of the story, but she refuses retract anything.
What do you do at this point? Is it completely unreasonable to feel that the professor who published the paper is creating a hostile environment?
No, it’s more than being “non-conclusive”, it’s stretching the concept of “evidence” beyond the breaking point.
What we have is evidence that social psychologists tend to self-identify as liberal rather than conservative, and that’s it. Beyond that you’ve just provided a series of increasingly wild speculations. It’s far, far, more plausible that there are few self-identified conservatives in social psychology because … get ready for a major revelation here … the very definition of “conservative” in the modern American context includes a taxonomy of personality traits which result in the corollary “very unlikely to want to be a social psychologist”.
If one defines “conservative” in the contemporary sense of the sort of person who today is likely to vote Republican then this seems manifestly true. Right here in this thread we have conservative-leaning types expressing hostility to academia in general, and I’m pretty sure that disdain would apply even more strongly to the “soft” sciences like social sciences, as opposed, say, to something like an MBA program in a business school. And if I you argue that the feeling is mutual – that academia tends to express a certain hostility to conservatives as defined above – then I would direct you to my previous quote from political psychologist John Jost about how “…nearly all of the best minds in science find liberal ideas to be closer to the mark with respect to evolution, human nature, mental health, close relationships, intergroup relations, ethics, social justice, conflict resolution, environmental sustainability, and so on” – and I would ask whether you don’t feel the animosity to be justified on the basis of the facts. And if you’re still not convinced, how about conservatives as defined by “Scott Walker and his administration”?
So, yes, I think there is evidence that conservatives don’t altogether feel welcome in many academic pursuits and institutions, but this is not because of artificial barriers that need to be “corrected” but because of what conservatives – in the contemporary American Republican context – think and believe. Joost et al. covered this subject in a highly cited 2003 paper. Conservatives may agree with some of it and may be put off by other parts, but if I were a conservative reading that paper I wouldn’t want to be involved in social psychology either!
Facts that reasonably lead to a particular conclusion. For example, I accept the anecdotes in the linked article, in combination with other known facts, as evidence that, using contemporary definitions, there are more self-identified liberals than conservatives in social psychology.
I do not accept that as “evidence” that this is because conservatives are being discriminated against, especially given the cited evidence that conservatives likely have no interest in being social psychologists!
Likewise, I do not accept the mysterious little holes in my back yard as evidence that an alien UFO landed there last night, especially given the evidence that gophers have been seen in the area!
We don’t actually discriminate against Those People - we sneer at them, call them names, judge their work by a double standard, and don’t let them in - but that has nothing to do with discrimination. Besides, they’re happier in the back of the bus with their own kind.
Ah, yes, the racism analogy again, and may I point out just one or two small differences with historical racism? If I may?
Conservatives are not “in the back of the bus”. Conservatives own the bus. They own the bus company. They freaking own the government – the one that is supposed to regulate the bus company, but, conveniently, does not. They freaking own the government that is currently cutting funding to academic teaching and research. They themselves aren’t on the bus, in the back of it or in the front of it, they’re up in the sky in their private jets, seeing how many social psychologists and other academics they can fire so they can cut taxes some more.
Otherwise, your analogy is terrific. Rosa Parks as the symbol for downtrodden conservatives, who aren’t allowed to become social psychologists!
