I'm no fan of Shermer, but he's right here.
Article as follows, emphasis added:
In the past couple of years imbroglios
erupted on college campuses across the U.S. over trigger warnings (for example,
alerting students to scenes of abuse and violence in The Great Gatsby
before assigning it), microaggressions (saying “I believe the most qualified
person should get the job”), cultural appropriation (a white woman wearing her
hair in cornrows), speaker disinvitations (Brandeis University canceling plans
to award Ayaan Hirsi Ali an honorary degree because of her criticism of Islam's
treatment of women), safe spaces (such as rooms where students can go after a
talk that has upset them), and social justice advocates competing to signal
their moral outrage over such issues as Halloween costumes (last year at Yale
University). Why such unrest in the most liberal institutions in the country?
Although there are many proximate
causes, there is but one ultimate cause—lack of political diversity to provide
checks on protests going too far. A 2014 study conducted by the University of
California, Los Angeles, Higher Education Research Institute found that 59.8
percent of all undergraduate faculty nationwide identify as far left or
liberal, compared with only 12.8 percent as far right or conservative. The
asymmetry is much worse in the social sciences. A 2015 study by psychologist
José Duarte, then at Arizona State University, and his colleagues in Behavioral
and Brain Sciences, entitled “Political Diversity Will Improve Social
Psychological Science,” found that 58 to 66 percent of social scientists are
liberal and only 5 to 8 percent conservative and that there are eight Democrats
for every Republican. The problem is most relevant to the study of areas
“related to the political concerns of the Left—areas such as race, gender,
stereotyping, environmentalism, power, and inequality.” The very things these
students are protesting.
How does this political asymmetry
corrupt social science? It begins with what subjects are studied and the
descriptive language employed. Consider a 2003 paper by social psychologist
John Jost, now at New York University, and his colleagues, entitled “Political
Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition.” Conservatives are described as
having “uncertainty avoidance,” “needs for order, structure, and closure,” as
well as “dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity,” as if these constitute a
mental disease that leads to “resistance to change” and “endorsement of inequality.”
Yet one could just as easily characterize liberals as suffering from a host of
equally malfunctioning cognitive states: a lack of moral compass that leads to
an inability to make clear ethical choices, a pathological fear of clarity that
leads to indecisiveness, a naive belief that all people are equally talented,
and a blind adherence in the teeth of contradictory evidence from behavior
genetics that culture and environment exclusively determine one's lot in life.
Duarte et al. find similar distortive
language across the social sciences, where, for instance, certain words are
used to suggest pernicious motives when confronting contradictory
evidence—“deny,” “legitimize,” “rationalize,” “justify,” “defend,”
“trivialize”—with conservatives as examples, as if liberals are always
objective and rational. In one test item, for example, the “endorsement of the
efficacy of hard work” was interpreted as an example of “rationalization of
inequality.” Imagine a study in which conservative values were assumed to be
scientific facts and disagreement with them was treated as irrational, the
authors conjecture counterfactually. “In this field, scholars might regularly
publish studies on ... ‘the denial of the benefits of a strong military’ or
‘the denial of the benefits of church attendance.’” The authors present
evidence that “embedding any type of ideological values into measures is
dangerous to science” and is “much more likely to happen—and to go unchallenged
by dissenters—in a politically homogeneous field.”
Political bias also twists how data are
interpreted. For instance, Duarte's study discusses a paper in which subjects
scoring high in “right-wing authoritarianism” were found to be “more likely to
go along with the unethical decisions of leaders.” Example: “not formally
taking a female colleague's side in her sexual harassment complaint against her
subordinate (given little information about the case).” Maybe what this finding
really means is that conservatives believe in examining evidence first, instead
of prejudging by gender. Call it “left-wing authoritarianism.”
The authors' solution to the political
bias problem is right out of the liberal playbook: diversity. Not just ethnic,
race and gender but viewpoint diversity. All of us are biased, and few of us can
see it in ourselves, so we depend on others to challenge us. As John Stuart
Mill noted in that greatest defense of free speech, On Liberty, “He who
knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.”
This article was originally published
with the title "Left Behind"
