7 ms·

Diversity of the Mind

71 points by jeremynixon 12y ago

iskander 12y ago
This would be more interesting if they had teased apart more informative axes of belief instead of categorizing people along the uninformative liberal vs. conservative spectrum of US politics. Do social psychologists believe that the class structure of society is meritocratic or unjust? Do they believe that racial discrimination plays a significant factor in social success? Do they believe that it's the appropriate role of government to remedy potential injustices? Do they want their country to be ruled according to religious traditions? I don't come away with a clear sense of what "conservative" means to the respondents, and it's possible to imagine some definitions which are very healthily at odds with the skeptical/questioning mindset of academics.
- Buntraceable 12y ago
  Additionally, it would have been interesting to hear where the respondents fall on the moral matrices, of which Haidt --who is leveling the assertion that conservatives are less common-- is a proponent. For those who haven't heard of Haidt's ideas, I highly recommend checking out his book The Righteous Mind: why good people are divided by politics and religion.
- jerf 12y ago
  No, it really wouldn't be more interesting. Does it matter precisely what "liberalism" is when 98% of the current grad students identify themselves as such? Do you really think you're going to be able to slice and dice words until this isn't a problem anymore, in the face of such a percentage? We're not talking 55%/45%, where the question of exactly what the borders are might be an interesting question. We're not even talking the overwhelming dominance of 80/20%. We're talking effective monoculture. It defies belief that this is just the error bars talking. And especially so for social scientists... are they really the people you want to accuse of being unclear on the meanings of the words "liberal" and "conservative" in some context? Betcha they could go on about the distinction for a great deal longer and with a great deal more precision than either of us!
  - dragonwriter 12y ago
    > Does it matter precisely what "liberalism" is when 98% of the current grad students identify themselves as such? Nothing in the source indicates that. There is a claim -- which cites a personal communication with no identified methodological basis -- that 2% identify as conservative (given a set of options that, from the parallel listing of the numbers from a broader population, appears to be liberal/moderate/conservative, and so which does not, even if accepted as ironclad, support a 98% liberal conclusion -- and further, the subsample size of "graduates and postdocs", and therefore the error margins of that group, are not identified.) But, in any case, yes, it matters what it means (and, particularly, whether it means the same thing to all the people with that self-identification) if you are interested in whether there is diversity of ideology rather than diversity of ideological identity labels. It is a fairly massive error to assume that those mean the same thing. > Do you really think you're going to be able to slice and dice words until this isn't a problem anymore, in the face of such a percentage? If it doesn't mean even roughly the same thing to the various people, what a large advantage in self-identification may tell you is that "liberal" is a popular label, without telling you that the label has any shared meaning which is itself overwhelmingly popular. > It defies belief that this is just the error bars talking. That would only be true if we had the size of the relevant subsamples and thus could have any idea of the size of the error bars, all we have is the full sample of 292, but that includes more than just the subgroup with 2% conservative identification for which you have invalidly assumed a 98% liberal identification. > And especially so for social scientists... are they really the people you want to accuse of being unclear on the meanings of the words "liberal" and "conservative" in some context? As someone with a degree in political science, I am quite aware that those terms have lots of different meanings even in the context of political ideology, which is why -- when actual substantive ideology rather than ideological identity is studied (and the "liberal" and "conservative" labels are used in the study), the actual operationalizations used of "liberal" and "conservative" are radically different between different studies.
- calibraxis 12y ago
  Yeah, there's a lot of variation in those terms, even just within the US. In the political sphere: conservative = extreme right wing (Republicans); liberal = moderate right wing (Democrats). In universities, I imagine it's a lot more complicated. A weak rule of thumb might be conservative = obviously pro-capitalist/racist/patriarchy; liberal = professional/managerial class? But it's complicated with von Humboldt conservatives and classical liberals. (Disclaimer: I tend to ignore most flamewars contrasting conservatives vs. liberals, so I may be uninformed. Because it's like Coke vs. Pepsi. I find critiques of liberals from leftists interesting though.)
kijin 12y ago
Liberal/moderate/conservative is an outdated distinction that is no longer useful to anyone but demagogues. When 98% of your subjects fall into one side of your division, it doesn't mean that there's not enough diversity. It means that your division is meaningless. People who would pick "liberal" when presented with the three choices above are by no means a homogeneous group, especially since the questionnaire didn't offer an "other" choice. Anarchists, communists, socialists, social democrats, feminists, postmodernists, and even some libertarians might pick "liberal" since the alternatives are even further from their true beliefs. Curiously, conservatives seem to be the ones who are always worried about "ideological imbalance", whereas most of the rest don't really care. It boils down to this weird idea that conservatism should account for roughly (and preferably more than) 50% of our mindshare, with all the other ideologies (conveniently lumped together under the label "liberalism") accounting for the other 50%. But that's just wrong, because there are more than two ideologies in this world. It's like dividing the world into "those who do X" and "those who don't", for any given X, and demanding that both groups be roughly equal. The wiki page for "political ideologies" lists a dozen major ideologies with hundreds of subdivisions. Should they all get equal mindshare?
- mrxd 12y ago
  Since the cultural turn of the 1970s, liberals have focused on cultural change as a way of achieving justice. They assumed that people conform to dominant social norms which they learn about through the media and through others in society. So the operating hypothesis is that, if you create the impression that (for example) racial equality is the dominant social norm through consistent and uniform expression of those views and the suppression of racist norms, then racism will disappear as people start to conform to those new values. (This is in contrast to the prior Marxist-influenced social science which assumed that culture mainly reflects economic realities, and you can't make racism just disappear while keeping the same economic conditions.) Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist and one of the co-authors of the paper. His work theorizes five foundations of morality—basically, ways of assessing the moral value of an act: harm, fairness, respect for authority, loyalty to one's group and purity/sanctity. The impact of the cultural turn shows up in his research. He found that conservatives tend to use all five foundations, while liberals only use the first two. Obviously for liberals, the remaining three are associated with patriarchal authority, nationalism and religious oppression. So, he's not just demanding equal representation of political ideologies. It seems that Haidt believes that the dominance of liberalism among social psychologists is harmful to the field because it is associated with a strategy of cultural change which obliges liberals to avoid lines of research into these other foundations of morality.
Gatsky 12y ago
The blog post has a mistake, there were only 292 not 2923 respondents (he copied a superscript 3 from the PDF). The mailing list had 1939 members[1], so only 15% responded. All the data quoted in the paper discussed in the blog is survey data... so it seems that a large proportion of academics that respond to surveys about their political ideology are liberal. This could also be explained by a large number of non-liberal academics who don't care for answering surveys about political ideology. Not sure what counts for rigorous exposition in the social sciences, but I had to laugh when the authors actually said that these ideology surveys overestimate the proportion of liberals because conservatives don't want to self-identify, and that this supports their point! [1] http://yoelinbar.net/papers/political_diversity.pdf http://yoelinbar.net/papers/political_diversity.pdf
hackuser 12y ago
For purposes of understanding this article, does anyone know anything about the author, Bryan Caplan? The website is the Library of Economics and Liberty and is funded by The Liberty Fund,[1]. In my brief review they appear to advocate for modern libertarian ideology. Does anyone know more about them? At least, this seems to be political advocacy and not scholarly analysis. (I'm not criticizing it; just trying to understand what I'm reading.) [1] http://www.libertyfund.org/ http://www.libertyfund.org/
- wmf 12y ago
  If you want the scholarly version, skip the blog post and click through to the original paper (which was discussed on HN previously but I can't find the thread). Page 26 of the paper does cite a study showing that libertarians have higher SAT scores, but that's probably not the only reason Caplan blogged it.
- clarkm 12y ago
  He's a Professor of Economics at GMU, and is probably one of the top 10 most popular econ bloggers on the web.
- none_for_me_thx 12y ago
  The Liberty Fund doesn't engage in political advocacy. They primarily (re)publish literature important to classical liberalism and the moral case for liberty (and history and law, etc). They also put on occasional conferences, and they maintain online libraries.
  - TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
    How is that not political advocacy? If a Socialist site 'republished literature important to classical Socialism and the moral case for social equality' would you not consider it a political entity?
dingleberry1j 12y ago
Libertardians who hate well built infrastructure. Time to expat to europe before these guys come to power.
michaelhoney 12y ago
Real talk: if someone describes themselves as conservative (in US political parlance) they are probably (not certainly, but probably) more selfish and more likely to have either factually incorrect or morally indefensible views on e.g climate change and social issues. I'd probably avoid hiring them too. Professions which require intellect but which aren't well-remunerated are typically stacked with "liberals", yes – because smart, non-greedy people tend to be liberals. (Yes, this is an assumption for which I only have a lifetime of anecdotal evidence. No, the fact that there exist smart, non-greedy conservatives and dumb greedy liberals is not a counterargument). (FWIW, I wasn't going to post this, as I didn't want to stir up a hornet's nest. But then I read http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2015-01-05/stiglitz-blocked-from-sec-panel-after-faulting-high-speed-trades.html http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2015-01-05/stiglitz-blocked-fr... and got angry again.)
jdp23 12y ago
Jonathan Haidt, one of the authors of the paper, has a page on "Post-partisan social psychology" with a 2011 presentation of his on the subject and various responses/debates. http://people.stern.nyu.edu/jhaidt/postpartisan.html http://people.stern.nyu.edu/jhaidt/postpartisan.html
tomlock 12y ago
Is this really presenting a fair picture? Really, if I had two candidates who were identical and the only differentiating factor I had was that one liked Candy Crush and the other one played Age of Empires, I don't think I'd take it to a coinflip. I like Age of Empires more than I like Candy Crush. I suppose this is the same type of insidious discrimination that happens because, for instance, people feel like a woman wouldn't be a good "culture" fit in a predominantly male dev team. My preference is however to work with people that have similar interests to me, but it is a preference very low on my list of co-worker traits. How low would it have to be before I'd answer I'm not at least "somewhat" biased based on the Candy Crush/AoE schism? I'm not sure, but honestly if two identical twins walked into my office with identical everything and one wore an ugly sweater I'd hire the one without. Unless the ugly sweater was really funny. I'm not sure if the wording of the question here could be better, or I'm just discriminatory.
- m-photonic 12y ago
  You're being discriminatory in a sense, but then being discriminatory is normal. It's just what people do, and the large-scale consequences can be trivial or important depending on any number of things. Whether or not it's worth intervening through policy (or simply through culture or collective intent) varies case by case, but I think there's a case to be made here.
  - tomlock 12y ago
    But why? What tangible impact has it had on conservatives?
    - m-photonic 12y ago
      I don't care about the harm done to conservatives, I care about the harm done to liberals. Of course people like to hang out with people who see things their way, and there's nothing wrong with that, but when everyone agrees, the culture turns into a circlejerk prone to groupthink and lower standards of reasoning. When people have to answer to those with different opinions, backgrounds, perspectives, and allegiances, they're forced to develop their viewpoints in a much more robust way. This is just common sense, but studies seem to back it up (as the blog post goes into).
paul 12y ago
I wonder what other disciplines are this badly skewed. Theology maybe?

71 points by jeremynixon 12y ago

This would be more interesting if they had teased apart more informative axes of belief instead of categorizing people along the uninformative liberal vs. conservative spectrum of US politics. Do social psychologists believe that the class structure of society is meritocratic or unjust? Do they believe that racial discrimination plays a significant factor in social success? Do they believe that it's the appropriate role of government to remedy potential injustices? Do they want their country to be ruled according to religious traditions? I don't come away with a clear sense of what "conservative" means to the respondents, and it's possible to imagine some definitions which are very healthily at odds with the skeptical/questioning mindset of academics.

Buntraceable 12y ago
Additionally, it would have been interesting to hear where the respondents fall on the moral matrices, of which Haidt --who is leveling the assertion that conservatives are less common-- is a proponent. For those who haven't heard of Haidt's ideas, I highly recommend checking out his book The Righteous Mind: why good people are divided by politics and religion.
jerf 12y ago
No, it really wouldn't be more interesting. Does it matter precisely what "liberalism" is when 98% of the current grad students identify themselves as such? Do you really think you're going to be able to slice and dice words until this isn't a problem anymore, in the face of such a percentage? We're not talking 55%/45%, where the question of exactly what the borders are might be an interesting question. We're not even talking the overwhelming dominance of 80/20%. We're talking effective monoculture. It defies belief that this is just the error bars talking. And especially so for social scientists... are they really the people you want to accuse of being unclear on the meanings of the words "liberal" and "conservative" in some context? Betcha they could go on about the distinction for a great deal longer and with a great deal more precision than either of us!
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > Does it matter precisely what "liberalism" is when 98% of the current grad students identify themselves as such? Nothing in the source indicates that. There is a claim -- which cites a personal communication with no identified methodological basis -- that 2% identify as conservative (given a set of options that, from the parallel listing of the numbers from a broader population, appears to be liberal/moderate/conservative, and so which does not, even if accepted as ironclad, support a 98% liberal conclusion -- and further, the subsample size of "graduates and postdocs", and therefore the error margins of that group, are not identified.) But, in any case, yes, it matters what it means (and, particularly, whether it means the same thing to all the people with that self-identification) if you are interested in whether there is diversity of ideology rather than diversity of ideological identity labels. It is a fairly massive error to assume that those mean the same thing. > Do you really think you're going to be able to slice and dice words until this isn't a problem anymore, in the face of such a percentage? If it doesn't mean even roughly the same thing to the various people, what a large advantage in self-identification may tell you is that "liberal" is a popular label, without telling you that the label has any shared meaning which is itself overwhelmingly popular. > It defies belief that this is just the error bars talking. That would only be true if we had the size of the relevant subsamples and thus could have any idea of the size of the error bars, all we have is the full sample of 292, but that includes more than just the subgroup with 2% conservative identification for which you have invalidly assumed a 98% liberal identification. > And especially so for social scientists... are they really the people you want to accuse of being unclear on the meanings of the words "liberal" and "conservative" in some context? As someone with a degree in political science, I am quite aware that those terms have lots of different meanings even in the context of political ideology, which is why -- when actual substantive ideology rather than ideological identity is studied (and the "liberal" and "conservative" labels are used in the study), the actual operationalizations used of "liberal" and "conservative" are radically different between different studies.
calibraxis 12y ago
Yeah, there's a lot of variation in those terms, even just within the US. In the political sphere: conservative = extreme right wing (Republicans); liberal = moderate right wing (Democrats). In universities, I imagine it's a lot more complicated. A weak rule of thumb might be conservative = obviously pro-capitalist/racist/patriarchy; liberal = professional/managerial class? But it's complicated with von Humboldt conservatives and classical liberals. (Disclaimer: I tend to ignore most flamewars contrasting conservatives vs. liberals, so I may be uninformed. Because it's like Coke vs. Pepsi. I find critiques of liberals from leftists interesting though.)

kijin 12y ago

Liberal/moderate/conservative is an outdated distinction that is no longer useful to anyone but demagogues. When 98% of your subjects fall into one side of your division, it doesn't mean that there's not enough diversity. It means that your division is meaningless. People who would pick "liberal" when presented with the three choices above are by no means a homogeneous group, especially since the questionnaire didn't offer an "other" choice. Anarchists, communists, socialists, social democrats, feminists, postmodernists, and even some libertarians might pick "liberal" since the alternatives are even further from their true beliefs. Curiously, conservatives seem to be the ones who are always worried about "ideological imbalance", whereas most of the rest don't really care. It boils down to this weird idea that conservatism should account for roughly (and preferably more than) 50% of our mindshare, with all the other ideologies (conveniently lumped together under the label "liberalism") accounting for the other 50%. But that's just wrong, because there are more than two ideologies in this world. It's like dividing the world into "those who do X" and "those who don't", for any given X, and demanding that both groups be roughly equal. The wiki page for "political ideologies" lists a dozen major ideologies with hundreds of subdivisions. Should they all get equal mindshare?

mrxd 12y ago
Since the cultural turn of the 1970s, liberals have focused on cultural change as a way of achieving justice. They assumed that people conform to dominant social norms which they learn about through the media and through others in society. So the operating hypothesis is that, if you create the impression that (for example) racial equality is the dominant social norm through consistent and uniform expression of those views and the suppression of racist norms, then racism will disappear as people start to conform to those new values. (This is in contrast to the prior Marxist-influenced social science which assumed that culture mainly reflects economic realities, and you can't make racism just disappear while keeping the same economic conditions.) Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist and one of the co-authors of the paper. His work theorizes five foundations of morality—basically, ways of assessing the moral value of an act: harm, fairness, respect for authority, loyalty to one's group and purity/sanctity. The impact of the cultural turn shows up in his research. He found that conservatives tend to use all five foundations, while liberals only use the first two. Obviously for liberals, the remaining three are associated with patriarchal authority, nationalism and religious oppression. So, he's not just demanding equal representation of political ideologies. It seems that Haidt believes that the dominance of liberalism among social psychologists is harmful to the field because it is associated with a strategy of cultural change which obliges liberals to avoid lines of research into these other foundations of morality.

Gatsky 12y ago

The blog post has a mistake, there were only 292 not 2923 respondents (he copied a superscript 3 from the PDF). The mailing list had 1939 members[1], so only 15% responded. All the data quoted in the paper discussed in the blog is survey data... so it seems that a large proportion of academics that respond to surveys about their political ideology are liberal. This could also be explained by a large number of non-liberal academics who don't care for answering surveys about political ideology. Not sure what counts for rigorous exposition in the social sciences, but I had to laugh when the authors actually said that these ideology surveys overestimate the proportion of liberals because conservatives don't want to self-identify, and that this supports their point! [1] http://yoelinbar.net/papers/political_diversity.pdf http://yoelinbar.net/papers/political_diversity.pdf

hackuser 12y ago

For purposes of understanding this article, does anyone know anything about the author, Bryan Caplan? The website is the Library of Economics and Liberty and is funded by The Liberty Fund,[1]. In my brief review they appear to advocate for modern libertarian ideology. Does anyone know more about them? At least, this seems to be political advocacy and not scholarly analysis. (I'm not criticizing it; just trying to understand what I'm reading.) [1] http://www.libertyfund.org/ http://www.libertyfund.org/

wmf 12y ago
If you want the scholarly version, skip the blog post and click through to the original paper (which was discussed on HN previously but I can't find the thread). Page 26 of the paper does cite a study showing that libertarians have higher SAT scores, but that's probably not the only reason Caplan blogged it.
clarkm 12y ago
He's a Professor of Economics at GMU, and is probably one of the top 10 most popular econ bloggers on the web.
none_for_me_thx 12y ago
The Liberty Fund doesn't engage in political advocacy. They primarily (re)publish literature important to classical liberalism and the moral case for liberty (and history and law, etc). They also put on occasional conferences, and they maintain online libraries.
- TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
  How is that not political advocacy? If a Socialist site 'republished literature important to classical Socialism and the moral case for social equality' would you not consider it a political entity?

dingleberry1j 12y ago

Libertardians who hate well built infrastructure. Time to expat to europe before these guys come to power.

michaelhoney 12y ago

Real talk: if someone describes themselves as conservative (in US political parlance) they are probably (not certainly, but probably) more selfish and more likely to have either factually incorrect or morally indefensible views on e.g climate change and social issues. I'd probably avoid hiring them too. Professions which require intellect but which aren't well-remunerated are typically stacked with "liberals", yes – because smart, non-greedy people tend to be liberals. (Yes, this is an assumption for which I only have a lifetime of anecdotal evidence. No, the fact that there exist smart, non-greedy conservatives and dumb greedy liberals is not a counterargument). (FWIW, I wasn't going to post this, as I didn't want to stir up a hornet's nest. But then I read http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2015-01-05/stiglitz-blocked-from-sec-panel-after-faulting-high-speed-trades.html http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2015-01-05/stiglitz-blocked-fr... and got angry again.)

jdp23 12y ago

Jonathan Haidt, one of the authors of the paper, has a page on "Post-partisan social psychology" with a 2011 presentation of his on the subject and various responses/debates. http://people.stern.nyu.edu/jhaidt/postpartisan.html http://people.stern.nyu.edu/jhaidt/postpartisan.html

tomlock 12y ago

Is this really presenting a fair picture? Really, if I had two candidates who were identical and the only differentiating factor I had was that one liked Candy Crush and the other one played Age of Empires, I don't think I'd take it to a coinflip. I like Age of Empires more than I like Candy Crush. I suppose this is the same type of insidious discrimination that happens because, for instance, people feel like a woman wouldn't be a good "culture" fit in a predominantly male dev team. My preference is however to work with people that have similar interests to me, but it is a preference very low on my list of co-worker traits. How low would it have to be before I'd answer I'm not at least "somewhat" biased based on the Candy Crush/AoE schism? I'm not sure, but honestly if two identical twins walked into my office with identical everything and one wore an ugly sweater I'd hire the one without. Unless the ugly sweater was really funny. I'm not sure if the wording of the question here could be better, or I'm just discriminatory.

m-photonic 12y ago
You're being discriminatory in a sense, but then being discriminatory is normal. It's just what people do, and the large-scale consequences can be trivial or important depending on any number of things. Whether or not it's worth intervening through policy (or simply through culture or collective intent) varies case by case, but I think there's a case to be made here.
- tomlock 12y ago
  But why? What tangible impact has it had on conservatives?
  - m-photonic 12y ago
    I don't care about the harm done to conservatives, I care about the harm done to liberals. Of course people like to hang out with people who see things their way, and there's nothing wrong with that, but when everyone agrees, the culture turns into a circlejerk prone to groupthink and lower standards of reasoning. When people have to answer to those with different opinions, backgrounds, perspectives, and allegiances, they're forced to develop their viewpoints in a much more robust way. This is just common sense, but studies seem to back it up (as the blog post goes into).

paul 12y ago

I wonder what other disciplines are this badly skewed. Theology maybe?