Jonathan Haidt’s presentation at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology conference has generated abundant commentary within and without the academy (for instance, see here and here), and not only because of Haidt’s measured, eloquent, and pointed delivery. What stands out most, perhaps, is the off-the-cuff poll of audience members for their political identification. “How many are liberal?” he called out, and 800 or so out of 1,000 raised their hands. “And how many are conservative” Three hands went up.
That’s another one of those stark counts that show up every year or so demonstrating what Haidt terms a “statistical improbability.” (Other surveys look at party registration and campaign donations.) He draws a parallel to hammer it home (cited in Tierney’s piece).
“’Anywhere in the world that social psychologists see women or minorities underrepresented by a factor of two or three, our minds jump to discrimination as the explanation,’ said Dr. Haidt, who called himself a longtime liberal turned centrist. ‘But when we find out that conservatives are underrepresented among us by a factor of more than 100, suddenly everyone finds it quite easy to generate alternate explanations.’”
That double-standard troubles academics and, generally, people on the left, and their response all-too-often aggravates their position. Here is how Megan McArdle summarized the response to her first column on the issue recently:
Let’s bracket the truth of those contentions and instead examine the rhetorical impact of them. A fair percentage of the populace identifies as conservative, and how do they hear these explanations? Conservatives, it is stated, are too greedy, closed-minded, irrational, superstitious, and anti-intellectual to make the academic grade. Conservative individuals of all stripes can’t help but take those assertions as applying to themselves. Do the people who espouse them believe that this approach advances their position?
