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Blinding Themselves: The Cost of Groupthink in Social Psychology
It is mentioned below that the Leftist bias in academe can damage social psychological research. I saw a vivid example of that during my research career in social psychology. I noted that when my colleagues designed a scale to measure conservatism, it normally showed little if any correlation with vote. So, apparently, lots of Leftists voted for conservative political candidates!
Basically, the scale designers never talked to conservatives so had only stereotyped and incorrect ideas of what conservatives actually thought.
By contrast my scales of conservatism predicted vote very solidly, with correlations as high as .50. How come? I am a conservative so was intimately familiar with what consrvatives actually think. My scales were valid. The Leftists' scales were not.
So did Leftists start using my scales? No way! They preferred to continue using their own invalid scales, thus making their findings of unknown meaning
The social sciences have a problem: If their scholars think too much alike, they will be blinded to the flaws and gaps in their research. Rather than explaining how individuals in society act and think, academics can sometimes slip blinders on themselves and the public.
Polling shows broad agreement within some disciplines. For instance, recent data from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology’s Diversity and Climate Survey revealed that almost 90 percent of their members who took the survey self-identify as liberals—but fewer than 5 percent identify as conservatives. This imbalance seems to affect how welcome conservative academics feel in scientific environments: They report feeling excluded more, they feel less free to express their ideas at SPSP events, and they do not believe that SPSP lives up to its diversity values.
And a study by Yoel Inbar and Joris Lammers of Tilburg University in the Netherlands showed that more than a third of the American scholars surveyed would be willing to discriminate against hiring a conservative job candidate, all else being equal.
In theory, the lack of political diversity shouldn’t affect research quality. Western civilization developed scientific methodologies to make sure that knowledge is universal and shareable. If the methods and analyses are adequate, the data openly available, and the conclusions justified, then any qualified investigator could evaluate the merits of a study. Ideally, scientific validity does not depend on the political or moral values of the scientist, but on the reasonability of the research process.
However, personal values and biases can affect researchers in multiple ways. They can affect how scientific ideas are conceived, developed, and tested. One of the biggest effects is in how values determine research questions.
How does a social scientist decide what to study? Undoubtedly, personal preferences push academics toward some topics over others. Similarly, scholars are embedded in a research hierarchy (laboratories, advisors, mentors, colleagues, assistants) that might make decisions for them—especially early in their careers. But those communities are usually committed to specific goals. Members of a laboratory studying the effects of smoking on the academic performance of college students probably are not indifferent to policies regarding smoking on campus. Those who study economic development want to find ways to ameliorate poverty. And those who study depression want to treat it better.
Funding agencies bring their own values to research, too: Grants are given to advance scientific knowledge in specific areas chosen by the values of the funding agency. Grant recipients, in turn, need to adjust their research interests to the funder’s vision.
Thus, the personal views of researchers shape research programs by investigating what they decide are most important. For example, the last three issues of the Journal of Social Issues (the flagship journal of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues) were special issues dedicated to “neoliberalism,” “ableism,” and “immigration and identity multiplicity.” These topics and the language used are clearly aligned with specific left-leaning views, which express what those scientists believe needs to be studied. It’s unlikely that special issues investigating entrepreneurship, the benefits of patriotism, or gender complementarity will follow.
It’s important to note, however, that choosing some topics over others is not a sign of low-quality science per se. Scientific studies on ableism might be as rigorous as any. The problem is that the ideological imbalance among researchers means equally valid research questions that enrich the understanding of society are left uninvestigated.
For example, for decades it was taken as common psychological knowledge that conservatives were more intolerant and prejudiced than liberals. However, psychologist Jarrett Crawford showed, in a series of studies, that those results depended on which groups were the target of prejudice. While right-wingers showed more prejudice and intolerance toward blacks, LGBT individuals, and welfare recipients, left-wingers show similar levels of intolerance for those with right-wing political values.
In other words, what is being researched depends on personal, social, and institutional values—considerations that are not necessarily rational nor objective. Liberal scholars studying prejudice might focus their research on victimized groups rather than more-secure ones, which is a noble objective and a valid scientific decision. Yet, their research can lead to activists or other academics claiming more than is scientifically valid.
In psychological terms, it is not that conservative ideologies are necessarily linked to prejudice, as had been suggested since the 1950s. Crawford showed—and the psychological establishment has come to accept—that prejudice can be found across the political spectrum, but targeted at different groups. That is the way science makes progress—testing the accepted consensus and foundational knowledge.
In another domain, a 2014 study showed that women with unplanned pregnancies did not change their decision about having an abortion after looking at an ultrasound. Those findings can be—and have been—used as scientific evidence for specific policy views and partisan agendas. However, the study was conducted in Planned Parenthood Los Angeles, where about 9 in 10 of the incoming patients were reported to be “highly certain” about their decision to terminate the pregnancy. This study is valuable in and of itself, but it should not be stretched to imply that all women with unplanned pregnancies will be unaffected by looking at an ultrasound.
And in a unique instance, one professor discovered his own research was biased because he didn’t have anyone around to challenge his assumptions. In the late 1990s Keith Stanovich, a prominent cognitive psychologist at the University of Toronto, and his colleagues published a scale to measure “actively open-minded thinking”—i.e. the disposition to rely on reasoning rather than impulses, to revise one’s beliefs or to tolerate ambiguity. Recently, studies showed that this trait was strongly negatively correlated with religious beliefs: the more religious someone is, the less open-minded they are. Those findings were consistent with previous literature about the relationship between religious beliefs and analytical thinking.
However, in a highly unusual publication, Stanovich himself revised his own scales and realized that they might be intrinsically skewed against religious individuals. Evidence showed that once the bias in the open-minded scale is corrected, the correlation decreases noticeably. Reflecting on this, Stanovich wrote: “It never occurred to us that these items would disadvantage any demographic group, let alone the religious minded. No doubt it never occurred to us because not a single member of our lab had any religious inclinations at all.”
The above examples show how the ideological imbalance in the social sciences has a cost. Some questions don’t get asked. Then, established “knowledge” does not get challenged for inaccuracy because academics do not have another way to frame the issue. Since the demographics of academia are not likely to change in the short-term, how can this issue be addressed by researchers?
The key is dialogue: In the early stages of a research project, social scientists could reach out to scholars in departments that traditionally do not hold dominant liberal views (such as business schools, health sciences, or engineering departments). Even a non-technical discussion of research questions could yield valuable insights about potential blind spots. Academic institutions could promote these dialogues to improve scientific research—which is the very reason they exist in the first place.
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Miss Virginia and the Political Realities of Public-School Reform
The political roots of the modern school-choice movement are still poorly understood nearly thirty years after the first publicly funded private-school voucher program was established in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1990. Miss Virginia, a narrative film in select theaters and Amazon Prime, helps fill this void, offering a rare look at the political realities underlying public school reform.
Directly inspired by real-life education reform activist Virginia Walden Ford, Miss Virginia tells the story of Virginia Walden (Uzo Aduba, Orange is the New Black), an African-American single parent turned education-reformer in Washington, D.C. As her teenage son, James (Niles Fitch), feels the lure of drug gangs and street life in their neighborhood, Walden tries to get him out of the failed public school and into a private-school alternative. At first, she tries to enroll him in a nearby religious school. The new school environment turns her son into an enthusiastic learner. But, even working two jobs, she can’t scrape up enough money to pay for the tuition.
When Walden is forced to re-enroll James in his old public school, her son continues to feel the pull of the streets. Naive to the public school system and its politics, Walden becomes increasingly desperate. She begins educating herself on the school system and lobby for a publicly funded school voucher to allow her and other parents to give their children the same opportunities as wealthier families.
She starts first at the school board, which refuses to listen to her, claiming she doesn’t have standing because she has not pre-registered to speak. (Yes, this happens in real life, too.)
Undaunted and energized by the dismissive attitude of public school officials, Walden moves to their congressional representative, Lorraine Townsend (Aunjanue Ellis, The Help, When They See Us). Unfortunately, despite her rhetoric supporting quality education, Townsend stonewalls Walden’s efforts with the support of the public school establishment. When Walden attends a public forum on education reform, the public school administrators and Townsend tell her that the problem is a lack of funding for the schools, and that vouchers are a short-term solution that doesn’t fix the problem.
Unwilling to give up, Walden confronts conservative Congressman Clifford Williams (Matthew Modine, Full Metal Jacket, Stranger Things), who presumably helped get the Milwaukee program off the ground. At first, he refuses to invest in Walden’s movement, claiming that Washington, D.C., parents simply don’t support the program. Walden sets out to prove him wrong by collecting signatures despite opposition from public school advocates and drug gang leaders who want to maintain their power of kids in the neighborhood.
The film takes liberties with historical details, but the themes and main plot points are on target. Most of these choices serve the narrative of the story. As in the movie, Virginia Walden Ford, the person on which the film character Virginia Walden is based, is not a natural public speaker. We see her evolve into a powerful voice for reform as she becomes more educated and more experienced with the entrenched special interests supporting the public school status quo. Ford’s son in real life, unlike the movie, received a privately funded scholarship to attend a private school. The school voucher, however, did actually get him out of a dysfunctional public school (where he later excelled).
Similar real-world experiences motivated Ford to mobilize parents in Washington, D.C., working against very real opposition from the public school establishment, so that other parents could reap the same benefits she did through publicly funded vouchers. In this sense, in a rare cinematic turn, Virginia Walden Ford is more heroic than the figure in the film. The highly structured storytelling framework for narrative film, however, would not have allowed this complicated story difficult if not impossible. (Hence, Miss Virginia is a narrative film, not a documentary.)
Nevertheless, the motivational effects of the benefits from private school vouchers on Ford were largely the same in real life as they are on Walden in the movie, maintaining the spirit and internal consistency of the story.
More importantly, Miss Virginia gets the most important elements of the struggle for private school vouchers right. Although the concept has been around for decades, modern support for private school vouchers started in America’s inner cities, not the suburbs or wealthy enclave neighborhoods. In an unlikely alliance which is under appreciated today, low-income, mostly minority parents and a few elected officials (e.g., Polly Williams in Wisconsin and Cleveland City Councilwoman Fannie Lewis), worked with conservative elected officials such as Governors Tommy Thompson (Wisconsin) and George Voinovich (Ohio) to pass state legislation enabling publicly funded private school vouchers.
Miss Virginia is a remarkably accurate map of the politics surrounding these fights, often in the inner-city neighborhoods, including the unusual but critical alliances it forged. This difference in Washington, D.C., was that the parents did not have a publicly elected representative of their district who was also a champion of their needs.
Virginia Walden Ford’s efforts were critical to Congress passing the District of Columbia’s school voucher program in 2003, which started up in 2005. The initial program registered 2,692 applicants, of which 1,848 were considered eligible based on income and residency criteria. Students for scholarships scholarships of up to $7,500 (about half the per pupil spending in the DC public schools at the time). About 1,000 students received scholarships in the first year out of 1,366 awardees.
Since the program’s inception, the program has received 8,480 applications and 5,547 students met eligibility requirements. The program has awarded 3,738 scholarships which are typically funded for the entire period the children are in school until graduation. As of January 2019, 1,650 students are still in the program.
Does the program work? Generally speaking, yes, but the evidence is somewhat mixed. Students in the program are significantly more likely to graduate high school—one of the best predictors of future success—and report fewer instances of bullying and intimidation. The authors of an independent program evaluation, “Evaluation of the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program:
Experimental Impacts After at Least Four Years” conducted by the National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance in the U.S. Department of Education, offer this conclusion:
Based on analysis of the final spring 2009 data we find that the Program significantly improved students’ chances of graduating from high school. The offer of an OSP scholarship raised students’ probability of completing high school by 12 percentage points overall. On average, after at least four years students who were offered (or used) scholarships had reading scores that were statistically higher than those who were not offered scholarships, while math scores were statistically similar to those who were not offered scholarships.
Additionally, the OSP raised parents’, but not students’ ratings of school safety and satisfaction. Parents were more satisfied and felt school was safer if their child was offered or used an OSP scholarship. The Program had no effect on students’ reports on school conditions.
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Did You Know? Grievance Studies in the UNC System
As academia becomes increasingly political and some professors call for an activist academy, some critics have questioned the impact of “cultural studies” and critical theory on the quality of research in the humanities.
Academics Helen Pluckrose, James Lindsay, and Peter Boghossian have led the reaction against scholarship-as-activism with their famous “grievance studies” hoax.
The three academics submitted ridiculous papers—such as a feminist version of Mein Kampf—to respected peer-reviewed journals associated with identity and cultural studies to showcase the low standards within these fields.
By grievance studies, Pluckrose et al. mean “gender studies, masculinities studies, queer studies, sexuality studies, psychoanalysis, critical race theory, critical whiteness theory, fat studies, sociology, and educational philosophy.”
To Pluckrose et al., grievance studies struggle because “scholarship based less upon finding truth and more upon attending to social grievances has become firmly established, if not fully dominant, within these fields, and their scholars increasingly bully students, administrators, and other departments into adhering to their worldview.”
The hoaxers view such an approach to scholarship as a rejection of science and the liberal tradition of scholarship in favor of a relativistic understanding of truth rooted in an individual’s collective identity.
At schools in the University of North Carolina system, grievance studies are alive and well. Students can find a major in grievance at every UNC school:
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