Psychology’s liberal bias

WorldMag.com ^ | 11 Feb | Segelstein

[flowerplough]

At the most recent conference of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, the most talked-about speech was one that essentially accused the attendees of bias.

Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist from the University of Virginia, started his presentation by polling the audience of approximately 1,000 psychologists. When he asked how many considered themselves to be politically liberal, about 80 percent of the hands went up. Centrists and libertarians? Dr. Haidt estimated that fewer than three-dozen hands were raised. When he asked how many were conservatives, precisely three hands went up.

As The New York Times reported, Haidt called that “a statistically impossible lack of diversity,” citing polls showing that 40 percent of Americans identify themselves as conservative and 20 percent as liberal.

He went on to call social psychologists a “tribal-moral community” whose “sacred values” impede unbiased research. “If a group circles around sacred values, they will evolve into a tribal-moral community. They’ll embrace science whenever it supports their sacred values, but they’ll ditch it or distort it as soon as it threatens a sacred value.”

Haidt cited the reaction to Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s warning in 1965 about rising unmarried pregnancy rates among blacks: “Moynihan was shunned by many of his colleagues at Harvard as racist. Open-minded inquiry into the problems of the black family was shut down for decades, precisely the decades in which it was most urgently needed.”

[hal ogen]

If you can...stay away from all psychologists. They are misguided uber-LIBs. Go to the APA website to view their assorted political-driven drivel.

[Méabh]

Ugh. I almost double-majored in psychology. The unquestioning acceptance of liberal opinions as scientific fact drove me away.

That, and I was already taking 20+ credit hours at a time...

[lurk]

Read Homosexuality and the Politics of Truth by Satinover. The APA was overrun by activists in the 70’s.

[Arm_Bears]

I hold a Ph.D. in an applied area of psychology, and I think Rush is a bit too soft on a couple of subjects; so be careful of painting with too broad of a brush.

I was a student member of the APA while I was in grad school and got so disgusted with them that I quit. When I told my research director, he was amazed and said he had been trying to work up the nerve to do the same as he was sick of the leftward tilt of the group. He finally did.

[armordog99]

The psych majors I knew in college had serious issues. The majority of them were also female, and what I have noticed with the majority of females is that it is all about feelings, not facts.

There was a really good book I read by Dr. David Buss, an evolutionary psychologist, called “The evolution of desire” he did the largest cross-cultural study of mating habits ever done. Surprisingly he found that there are major differences in mate selection and mating habits between males and females. When it first came out the articles by mainstream psychology and feminists against it were numerous.

[flowerplough]

So you’re one of the article’s three. Three out of a thousand is close enough for the author, and me, to say “all” in casual commentary or conversation. Don’t be an over-literalist. Please don’t be picayune. My wife is an occasional literalist; a close coworker is is a hyper-literalist. I often want to (not literally) kill them for it.

[pack29172]

I was pleasantly surprised to read this article in, of all places, the NYT on Feb 7. While shedding a light on the obvious, nothing positive will come of this. For such elite, the conservative thought does not warrant any protection, it is to be sought out, ridiculed without reason, quarantined and eliminated.