12 ms·

Taboos and Self-Censorship Among U.S. Psychology Professors

94 points by kvee 2y ago

pmarreck 2y ago
At least none of you studied evo psych in college... /facepalm And its legitimacy didn't matter. It conflicted with the blank-slate hypothesis, therefore it had to go...
- blamestross 2y ago
  The last thread holding together the illusion of fair meritocracy in our society is tabla rasa.
  - pmarreck 2y ago
    Good point.
Dig1t 2y ago
The 10 questions will get you banned/flagged/ousted from even normal conversation amongst friends or casual groups, of course people are not going to risk their professional reputations with them. Discovering the truth of these questions is not really worth ruining your life. Look at James Watson, even if you win a Nobel Prize, your career can still be ruined if you say the wrong thing.
- bluescrn 2y ago
  Of course, without heretics, we could still all believe in a geocentric universe, or even a flat Earth.
  - iknowSFR 2y ago
    This is one of the more wild social concepts that the modern age of social media has super charged. At its core: what’s the acceptable line between presenting counter-views versus heresy? And one level up: what’s the responsibility of the audience to consider any counter, even heresy? There are consequences in every choice.
    - Capricorn2481 2y ago
      Not sure it is super charged at all considering many of these heretical figures were killed. I feel like it's easier than ever to have a fringe opinion. We're in a day and age where people unironically believe in Qanon
  - stared 2y ago
    From "Kolmogorov Complicity And The Parable Of Lightning" (https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-...): "Did Giordano Bruno die for his astronomical discoveries or his atheism? False dichotomy: you can’t have a mind that questions the stars but never thinks to question the Bible. The best you can do is have a Bruno who questions both, but is savvy enough to know which questions he can get away with saying out loud. And the real Bruno wasn’t that savvy."
- dvfjsdhgfv 2y ago
  Speaking your mind is something you can afford only once you already own a fortune, see e.g. all what is happening around J.K. Rowling.
- dj_gitmo 2y ago
  I am not against taboos. Taboos can be good. However, it can be a problem when what is considered taboo expands to encompass basically everything.
  - bluescrn 2y ago
    It’s fine for certain topics to be taboos in polite conversation around the family dinner table or at a social event. But in a professional setting, particularly amongst scientists and academics, it seems essential that difficult conversations can be had openly.
- bithive123 2y ago
  What you say is true, but tragic. What is a professional reputation worth if one ignores inconvenient truths? No opinion (however lay or erudite) is deeply serious if truth is less important than ego preservation. Any system of thought that disregards truth is ultimately incoherent and will produce nothing of real value.
  - zug_zug 2y ago
    I think that self-censorship is practically universal and a core tenant of our social behavior. Somehow I think some group(s) of people have gotten it in their head that they are the only ones who have to self-censor and that they are a victim for it, but I think if you challenge yourself you can come up with hundreds of times self-censoring in social situations is the obviously correct choice (political or not). Think about it, from disallowing words like "hell", to talking about death, to discussing sex, to oversharing, there actually is a very small percentage of combinations of words that are appropriate conversation.
    - riehwvfbk 2y ago
      I guess being a grammar Nazi is probably another thing that should be self-censored, but... it's "tenet", not a renter.
devindotcom 2y ago
An odd article. Their previous work hits a lot of the same notes. But the selective transparency on the methods - for instance, only briefly describing how they arrived at these "taboo conclusions" - suggests they're more interested in stirring the pot and keeping these assertions circulating under the guise of suppressed science. (My mistake, they relocated the pilot study to supp mat, but it is not reassuring to read.) "A vocal minority and silent majority may have created a seemingly hostile climate against taboo conclusions and the scholars who forward them, even if the silent majority has great contempt for the vocal minority. Future research should test these possibilities more directly." This kind of editorializing feels out of place and very revealing. This retraction is perhaps indicative of the general quality of the work as well: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797619897915 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/095679761989791...
- xnyan 2y ago
  > how they arrived at these "taboo conclusions" I agree with many of the "taboo" conclusions, so just like the paper I am not commenting on their veracity when I say these are common beliefs held in many righter leaning academic circles. There's nothing wrong with polling people about these ideas, but I would have rather the respondents be given more open ended prompts about what they thought were taboo ideas vs what the researcher wanted them to think about.
- floor2 2y ago
  Literally 100% of published papers in psychology, sociology and related fields will have "editorializing" equal or greater to the line you quoted. This one likely only stood out to you because it went against your beliefs while others align to them, or because you don't regularly read such publications to be familiar with norms.
crmd 2y ago
The most surprising result to me is how scholars tended to report that moral concerns that a study’s conclusions could harm vulnerable groups was NOT a valid reason to avoid publishing (M = 29.61, SD = 27.68). I assumed this was a primary motivation for all the tiptoeing around taboo topics.
- lazide 2y ago
  I’d assume it would be due to blowback from peers and sponsors. Vulnerable groups by definition aren’t those.
lupusreal 2y ago
> "Younger, more left-leaning, and female faculty were generally more opposed to controversial scholarship." That's so counterintuitive, I simply cannot believe it's true.
- BiteCode_dev 2y ago
  I have a large and very eclectic group of buddies, ranging from one extreme to the other, in term of politic, life style, believes, education, etc. Anecdotally, this is true in my circle. Left leaning people around me think they are more open minded, but really they just have a different set of things they accept. They have the same number of icks, just not at the same place. The big gap is in how they behave when in contact with things they don't like. And right leaning people have been so far more capable of cooperating with those who don't match their values. Also, on paper, left leaning have expressed more humane values, espacially when very general or abstract. But in the day to day, when it comes to the mondain or practical, I've seen the sexist or racist guys help more my muslim or girl friends that the ones saying every body is equal. It weirds me out.
  - 2cynykyl 2y ago
    I too always got the impression that 'cancellations' were spearheaded by young, leftists. Not sure where gender comes in to play though.
    - gmarx 2y ago
      I refer you to the definitive resource on this issue- the movie "Mean Girls". This movie is the key to understanding the current age.
    - rootusrootus 2y ago
      Early on perhaps that was true, but cancel culture seems to have broad appeal across the political spectrum these days. Although you could make an argument that it still leans left on the public side, with more of a focus on private death threats and harassment on the right. They don't approach the problem of crushing dissent with exactly the same strategy.
senorqa 2y ago
Cancel Culture at its best!
brikym 2y ago
When even the real faculties of science have become financially driven and corrupted you know that soft 'science' like psychology is even worse.
- readthenotes1 2y ago
  It's very amusing to read about this in the midst of the replication crisis. They might as well have done the same study on tarot card readers
  - attemptone 2y ago
    We have to look not far from our own field to see a replication crisis brewing. The results in ML papers are obviously moving in the same direction, all while beating SOTA by miniscule amounts. IMO psychology became a lot less interesting when it tried to become more scientific.
rhapsodic 2y ago
[dead]
ano-ther 2y ago
Is it meaningful to do linear regressions through clouds like the ones shown in Figure 1? https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/17456916241252085#fig1-17456916241252085 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/17456916241252...
- airstrike 2y ago
  No
- ChainOfFools 2y ago
  Wow! To expect that a meaningful signal can precipitate out of such a wide noise field seems almost comically credulous. I'm most impressed that they had the temerity to recruit that figure as 'support' for their conclusions.
- gus_massa 2y ago
  the slope is the covariance, that is meaninful.
TMWNN 2y ago
Bien-pensants will tell us "Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?" But it's impossible to deny forever what the lying eyes say. Example: From a 2018 open letter by an eminent geneticist, "How Genetics Is Changing Our Understanding of 'Race" <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/opinion/sunday/genetics-race.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/opinion/sunday/genetics-r...>: >I am worried that well-meaning people who deny the possibility of substantial biological differences among human populations are digging themselves into an indefensible position, one that will not survive the onslaught of science. I am also worried that whatever discoveries are made — and we truly have no idea yet what they will be — will be cited as “scientific proof” that racist prejudices and agendas have been correct all along, and that those well-meaning people will not understand the science well enough to push back against these claims.
zug_zug 2y ago
Is self-censorship a bad thing? Suppose you had a finding that infidelity leads to "better" genes for the kids. I imagine most scientists wouldn't want to publish that paper because it's unpleasant to think about and seems to challenge a core tenant of our society (fidelity). Or for example suppose one found out a huge correlation between IQ and a political party. No matter which direction they found it, most researchers would probably rightly self-censor that on the basis that it's not really a productive thing to try to put out there. A few of the examples in the paper really are important questions in my opinion (understanding gender identity on as scientific a level as we can), but most of them aren't. For example I don't think question 6 is important -- what's important is research on reducing crime rates. I think claiming a certain race commits disproportionate violent crime is like pointing out one gender commits disproportionate crime. True or not, it kinda doesn't matter, and when somebody brings it up you have to ask if their motivation is to reduce crime or grind an axe.
- riehwvfbk 2y ago
  To answer your question: yes. Yes it is a bad thing. Things that are untrue but you can't question for the sake of societal cohesion are called "religion", not "science".
  - zug_zug 2y ago
    I'm just not convinced it really is a problem that 1% of topics are taboo. I think taboos exist for a reason, and it's mostly good for us as a species to collectively wall-off certain categories of behavior/thought/speech.
    - riehwvfbk 2y ago
      Correction: you think taboos you happen to agree with exist for a reason. For example, say you lived in modern-day Russia where it is taboo to say that Putin can make a mistake and that the West is not all-evil. Still a good taboo? Even if it is accepted by the majority?
      - 2y ago
Log_out_ 2y ago
Psychology is privatized. It consist of one guy writting queries running against annonymized userdata at palantir. Ocassionally he has a mental breakdown and turns into a grandfather clock writing strange gobledegock on a message board with a orange border. He is not happy, but then again, those are just the gears grinding making sound.

94 points by kvee 2y ago

At least none of you studied evo psych in college... /facepalm And its legitimacy didn't matter. It conflicted with the blank-slate hypothesis, therefore it had to go...

blamestross 2y ago
The last thread holding together the illusion of fair meritocracy in our society is tabla rasa.
- pmarreck 2y ago
  Good point.

Dig1t 2y ago

The 10 questions will get you banned/flagged/ousted from even normal conversation amongst friends or casual groups, of course people are not going to risk their professional reputations with them. Discovering the truth of these questions is not really worth ruining your life. Look at James Watson, even if you win a Nobel Prize, your career can still be ruined if you say the wrong thing.

bluescrn 2y ago
Of course, without heretics, we could still all believe in a geocentric universe, or even a flat Earth.
- iknowSFR 2y ago
  This is one of the more wild social concepts that the modern age of social media has super charged. At its core: what’s the acceptable line between presenting counter-views versus heresy? And one level up: what’s the responsibility of the audience to consider any counter, even heresy? There are consequences in every choice.
  - Capricorn2481 2y ago
    Not sure it is super charged at all considering many of these heretical figures were killed. I feel like it's easier than ever to have a fringe opinion. We're in a day and age where people unironically believe in Qanon
- stared 2y ago
  From "Kolmogorov Complicity And The Parable Of Lightning" (https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-...): "Did Giordano Bruno die for his astronomical discoveries or his atheism? False dichotomy: you can’t have a mind that questions the stars but never thinks to question the Bible. The best you can do is have a Bruno who questions both, but is savvy enough to know which questions he can get away with saying out loud. And the real Bruno wasn’t that savvy."
dvfjsdhgfv 2y ago
Speaking your mind is something you can afford only once you already own a fortune, see e.g. all what is happening around J.K. Rowling.
dj_gitmo 2y ago
I am not against taboos. Taboos can be good. However, it can be a problem when what is considered taboo expands to encompass basically everything.
- bluescrn 2y ago
  It’s fine for certain topics to be taboos in polite conversation around the family dinner table or at a social event. But in a professional setting, particularly amongst scientists and academics, it seems essential that difficult conversations can be had openly.
bithive123 2y ago
What you say is true, but tragic. What is a professional reputation worth if one ignores inconvenient truths? No opinion (however lay or erudite) is deeply serious if truth is less important than ego preservation. Any system of thought that disregards truth is ultimately incoherent and will produce nothing of real value.
- zug_zug 2y ago
  I think that self-censorship is practically universal and a core tenant of our social behavior. Somehow I think some group(s) of people have gotten it in their head that they are the only ones who have to self-censor and that they are a victim for it, but I think if you challenge yourself you can come up with hundreds of times self-censoring in social situations is the obviously correct choice (political or not). Think about it, from disallowing words like "hell", to talking about death, to discussing sex, to oversharing, there actually is a very small percentage of combinations of words that are appropriate conversation.
  - riehwvfbk 2y ago
    I guess being a grammar Nazi is probably another thing that should be self-censored, but... it's "tenet", not a renter.

devindotcom 2y ago

An odd article. Their previous work hits a lot of the same notes. But the selective transparency on the methods - for instance, only briefly describing how they arrived at these "taboo conclusions" - suggests they're more interested in stirring the pot and keeping these assertions circulating under the guise of suppressed science. (My mistake, they relocated the pilot study to supp mat, but it is not reassuring to read.) "A vocal minority and silent majority may have created a seemingly hostile climate against taboo conclusions and the scholars who forward them, even if the silent majority has great contempt for the vocal minority. Future research should test these possibilities more directly." This kind of editorializing feels out of place and very revealing. This retraction is perhaps indicative of the general quality of the work as well: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797619897915 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/095679761989791...

xnyan 2y ago
> how they arrived at these "taboo conclusions" I agree with many of the "taboo" conclusions, so just like the paper I am not commenting on their veracity when I say these are common beliefs held in many righter leaning academic circles. There's nothing wrong with polling people about these ideas, but I would have rather the respondents be given more open ended prompts about what they thought were taboo ideas vs what the researcher wanted them to think about.
floor2 2y ago
Literally 100% of published papers in psychology, sociology and related fields will have "editorializing" equal or greater to the line you quoted. This one likely only stood out to you because it went against your beliefs while others align to them, or because you don't regularly read such publications to be familiar with norms.

crmd 2y ago

The most surprising result to me is how scholars tended to report that moral concerns that a study’s conclusions could harm vulnerable groups was NOT a valid reason to avoid publishing (M = 29.61, SD = 27.68). I assumed this was a primary motivation for all the tiptoeing around taboo topics.

lazide 2y ago
I’d assume it would be due to blowback from peers and sponsors. Vulnerable groups by definition aren’t those.

lupusreal 2y ago

> "Younger, more left-leaning, and female faculty were generally more opposed to controversial scholarship." That's so counterintuitive, I simply cannot believe it's true.

BiteCode_dev 2y ago
I have a large and very eclectic group of buddies, ranging from one extreme to the other, in term of politic, life style, believes, education, etc. Anecdotally, this is true in my circle. Left leaning people around me think they are more open minded, but really they just have a different set of things they accept. They have the same number of icks, just not at the same place. The big gap is in how they behave when in contact with things they don't like. And right leaning people have been so far more capable of cooperating with those who don't match their values. Also, on paper, left leaning have expressed more humane values, espacially when very general or abstract. But in the day to day, when it comes to the mondain or practical, I've seen the sexist or racist guys help more my muslim or girl friends that the ones saying every body is equal. It weirds me out.
- 2cynykyl 2y ago
  I too always got the impression that 'cancellations' were spearheaded by young, leftists. Not sure where gender comes in to play though.
  - gmarx 2y ago
    I refer you to the definitive resource on this issue- the movie "Mean Girls". This movie is the key to understanding the current age.
  - rootusrootus 2y ago
    Early on perhaps that was true, but cancel culture seems to have broad appeal across the political spectrum these days. Although you could make an argument that it still leans left on the public side, with more of a focus on private death threats and harassment on the right. They don't approach the problem of crushing dissent with exactly the same strategy.

senorqa 2y ago

Cancel Culture at its best!

brikym 2y ago

When even the real faculties of science have become financially driven and corrupted you know that soft 'science' like psychology is even worse.

readthenotes1 2y ago
It's very amusing to read about this in the midst of the replication crisis. They might as well have done the same study on tarot card readers
- attemptone 2y ago
  We have to look not far from our own field to see a replication crisis brewing. The results in ML papers are obviously moving in the same direction, all while beating SOTA by miniscule amounts. IMO psychology became a lot less interesting when it tried to become more scientific.

rhapsodic 2y ago

[dead]

ano-ther 2y ago

Is it meaningful to do linear regressions through clouds like the ones shown in Figure 1? https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/17456916241252085#fig1-17456916241252085 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/17456916241252...

airstrike 2y ago
No
ChainOfFools 2y ago
Wow! To expect that a meaningful signal can precipitate out of such a wide noise field seems almost comically credulous. I'm most impressed that they had the temerity to recruit that figure as 'support' for their conclusions.
gus_massa 2y ago
the slope is the covariance, that is meaninful.

TMWNN 2y ago

Bien-pensants will tell us "Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?" But it's impossible to deny forever what the lying eyes say. Example: From a 2018 open letter by an eminent geneticist, "How Genetics Is Changing Our Understanding of 'Race" <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/opinion/sunday/genetics-race.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/opinion/sunday/genetics-r...>: >I am worried that well-meaning people who deny the possibility of substantial biological differences among human populations are digging themselves into an indefensible position, one that will not survive the onslaught of science. I am also worried that whatever discoveries are made — and we truly have no idea yet what they will be — will be cited as “scientific proof” that racist prejudices and agendas have been correct all along, and that those well-meaning people will not understand the science well enough to push back against these claims.

zug_zug 2y ago

Is self-censorship a bad thing? Suppose you had a finding that infidelity leads to "better" genes for the kids. I imagine most scientists wouldn't want to publish that paper because it's unpleasant to think about and seems to challenge a core tenant of our society (fidelity). Or for example suppose one found out a huge correlation between IQ and a political party. No matter which direction they found it, most researchers would probably rightly self-censor that on the basis that it's not really a productive thing to try to put out there. A few of the examples in the paper really are important questions in my opinion (understanding gender identity on as scientific a level as we can), but most of them aren't. For example I don't think question 6 is important -- what's important is research on reducing crime rates. I think claiming a certain race commits disproportionate violent crime is like pointing out one gender commits disproportionate crime. True or not, it kinda doesn't matter, and when somebody brings it up you have to ask if their motivation is to reduce crime or grind an axe.

riehwvfbk 2y ago
To answer your question: yes. Yes it is a bad thing. Things that are untrue but you can't question for the sake of societal cohesion are called "religion", not "science".
- zug_zug 2y ago
  I'm just not convinced it really is a problem that 1% of topics are taboo. I think taboos exist for a reason, and it's mostly good for us as a species to collectively wall-off certain categories of behavior/thought/speech.
  - riehwvfbk 2y ago
    Correction: you think taboos you happen to agree with exist for a reason. For example, say you lived in modern-day Russia where it is taboo to say that Putin can make a mistake and that the West is not all-evil. Still a good taboo? Even if it is accepted by the majority?
    - 2y ago

Log_out_ 2y ago

Psychology is privatized. It consist of one guy writting queries running against annonymized userdata at palantir. Ocassionally he has a mental breakdown and turns into a grandfather clock writing strange gobledegock on a message board with a orange border. He is not happy, but then again, those are just the gears grinding making sound.