How not to improve the moral ecology of campus
Writing at the philosophy/politics blog Crooked Timber, philosopher John Holbo offers a critique of my arguments about the need for more viewpoint diversity on campus. Holbo believes that my arguments contain an internal logical contradiction, which he explains like this:
Haidt is highly bothered about two problems he sees with liberalism on campus – and in other environments in which lefties predominate….
1) An unbalanced moral ecology. Allegedly liberals have a thinner base of values, whereas conservatives have a broader one. Everyone, liberal and conservative alike, is ok with care/no harm/liberty – although liberals are stronger on these. Conservatives are much stronger on the loyalty/authority/purity axis, since allegedly liberals are weak-to-negligible here…. So: not enough conservatives in liberal environments to ensure a flexible, broad base of values. How illiberal!
2) Political correctness. Haidt has a real bug in his ear about this one.
The logic problem is this. If 2) is a problem, 1) is necessarily solved. And if solving 2) is important, then the proposed solution to 1) is wrong (or at least no reason has been given to suppose it is right).
Holbo’s claim is that if PC is really a problem, then that necessarily means that universities are full of people who are…
“shooting through the roof along the loyalty/authority/purity axis. Because that’s what PC is. An authoritarian insistence on ‘safe spaces’ and language policing, trigger warnings and other stuff.”
But if campuses are truly full of left-wing authoritarians (he says), then there’s no imbalance in the moral ecology, because all of the moral foundations are represented.
But there’s a big problem with Holbo’s argument. I don’t say that the problem on campus is that there’s an absence of one or more foundations. I say, over and over again, that the decline in political diversity has led to a loss of institutionalized disconfirmation. This was our argument in the BBS essay on political diversity that got me started down this road, and which documented the rapid political purification of psychology since the 1990s.
And we say it succinctly on the Welcome page of Heterodox Academy:
Welcome to our site. We are professors who want to improve our academic disciplines. Many of us have written about a particular problem: the loss or lack of “viewpoint diversity.” It’s what happens when the great majority of people in a field think the same way on important issues that are not really settled matters of fact. We don’t want viewpoint diversity on whether the Earth is round versus flat. But do we want everyone to share the same presuppositions when it comes to the study of race, class, gender, inequality, evolution, or history? Can research that emerges from an ideologically uniform and orthodox academy be as good, useful, and reliable as research that emerges from a more heterodox academy?
Science is among humankind’s most successful institutions not because scientists are so rational and open minded but because scholarly institutions work to counteract the errors and flaws of what are, after all, normal cognitively challenged human beings. We academics are generally biased toward confirming our own theories and validating our favored beliefs. But as long as we can all count on the peer review process and a vigorous post-publication peer debate process, we can rest assured that most obvious errors and biases will get called out. Researchers who have different values, political identities, and intellectual presuppositions and who disagree with published findings will run other studies, obtain opposing results, and the field will gradually sort out the truth.
Unless there is nobody out there who thinks differently. Or unless the few such people shrink from speaking up because they expect anger in response, even ostracism. That is what sometimes happens when orthodox beliefs and “sacred” values are challenged.
Our concern at Heterodox Academy is very simple. It was expressed perfectly in 1859 by John Stuart Mill, in On Liberty:
He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion… Nor is it enough that he should hear the opinions of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them…he must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form.
Holbo seems to think that if you were to start with a campus faculty entirely composed of non-authoritarian progressives (people like Nick Kristof or Barack Obama, who praise the importance of dissent), and then you added in some authoritarian progressives, who punish dissent on their most sacred issues, you would improve the campus ecology. Well, Holbo is right that you’d be adding a kind of diversity, but it’s one that is often hostile to other viewpoints. Mill and I and the rest of Heterodox Academy think it would be better to expose students—and professors—to people who hold views across the political spectrum, especially if you can do it within an institution that fosters a sense of community and norms of civility. We don’t care about balance. We don’t need every view to be represented. We just want to break up orthodoxy. Is that illogical?
Read More
Politics, Polarization, and Populism
My colleagues and I developed Moral Foundations Theory to understand differences between cultures, but early on we noticed that it was helpful for understanding the different moral “matrices” of left and right within each nation. You can see our empirical and theoretical publications here. Our main academic review paper is here.
As political polarization increased rapidly in the USA during the Bush and Obama years, I turned my attention from basic research to applied, asking: How can moral psychology help us understand the forces making American democracy so dysfunctional? And how can moral psychology help citizens understand each other across the political divide? Those were my two main goals in The Righteous Mind.
While writing that book I stepped out of the progressive moral matrix I had lived in since high school and became a committed centrist: I came to believe that each side, each political movement, understands some social processes and moral truths very well, but goes blind to others. I came to believe that partisanship of any kind causes motivated reasoning in social scientists, just as in all other human beings. I began to grow concerned about the quality of social science research, given the increasing homogeneity of political beliefs in all social sciences (with the exception of economics, in which the Democrat-to-Republican ratio is merely 4 to 1).
I co-founded several projects to apply moral psychology, including CivilPolitics.org (with Ravi Iyer and Matt Motyl) and AsteroidsClub.org (with Liz Joyner). See also the report of the AEI-Brookings Working Group on Poverty and Opportunity, which provides a model for doing evidence-based public policy in a politically polarized time.
I was working on these problems for several years when the rate of change began accelerating in 2015. There were moral meltdowns on university campuses and populist rebellions across Europe and the USA. Faith in Democracy is waning rapidly. Illiberal movements on the right (such as the Alt-right) and the left (such as identity politics and “safety culture“) are gaining strength and ramping each other up, hyper-activating the tribal psychology that I described in The Righteous Mind. I am extremely alarmed. Peaceful and open multi-ethnic democracies are wondrous creations, given our tribal heritage, and two bands of arsonists (the extremists) are flinging matches at them all across the Western world, while the more reasonable majorities on each side just point their finger at the extremists on the other side, and everyone is immersed in a river of outrage-inducing news, not all of it real (for left or right), courtesy of social media and its mobocratic algorithms.
So this is what I’m working on in 2016 and 2017: 1) repairing the intellectual climate in universities via the collaboration at HeterodoxAcademy.org, 2) writing a book on capitalism, morality, and democracy, 3) using moral psychology to improve business ethics, and 4) writing a book with Greg Lukianoff on how universities came to teach bad thinking, which is making education, workplaces, and democracy so much more dysfunctional.
Here are my major essays and talks on political psychology, polarization, and populism
**If you are interested in current events and want to read or watch just one or two things, choose from among those preceded by **
A) On Populism and Nationalism — How and why they are shaking the world now
In 2015 and 2016 I wrote a series of 3 essays that tell a coherent and cumulative story about how capitalism set in motion a series of economic and psychological changes that led to today’s battle between “globalists” and “nationalists.” It is not a coincidence that similar conflicts are playing out in diverse nations.
1) How Capitalism Changes Conscience (Center for Humans and Nature, 2015)
2) ** When and Why Nationalism Beats Globalism (The American Interest, July 2016)
3) The ethics of globalism, nationalism, and patriotism (Sept. 2016)
See also:
4) Donald Trump supporters think about morality differently than other voters. Here’s how. (Vox, with Emily Ekins, Feb. 2016). An analysis of the moral foundations of voters in the US Presidential primaries.
5) Audio of my conversation with Nick Clegg, “The rise of populism and the backlash against the elites”. At Intelligence Squared, London, Nov. 2016.
B) On the causes of dysfunction and rising polarization in American politics
1) ** The top 10 reasons American politics is so broken (Washington Post, with Sam Abrams, Jan. 2015)
2) Keynote address to American Psychological Association, on political polarization, incivility, and intolerance (August 2016)
C) On how to forgive, co-exist, and get along despite political polarization and animosity
1) We need a little fear. (New York Times, Nov. 2012). My attempt to encourage cross partisan understanding in the wake of the 2012 Presidential election. The “asteroids” idea presented there led to…
2) TED talk: How common threats can make common (political) ground (December, 2012)
3) ** How to get beyond our tribal politics. (Wall Street Journal, Nov. 2016)
4) ** TED conversation with Chris Anderson:”Can a divided America heal?” (November 2016)
D) On political polarization and rising illiberalism in American universities
See my page on Viewpoint Diversity in the Academy, especially my ** Lecture at Duke University, on Why universities must choose one telos — Truth or Social Justice.
E) On identity politics–which I believe is fundamentally incompatible with success and progress in multi-ethnic democracies. I have not yet written on this topic, but here are some essays (and one rant) that I find deeply insightful:
1) Jonathan Pie: Rant from a British comedian on how identity politics triggered the backlash that got Trump elected.
2) ** Mark Lilla: The end of identity liberalism. (NYT, Nov. 2016)
3) Richard Rorty: See this essay by Jennifer Senior, on Rorty’s prophecy about 2016 in his 1998 book Achieving our Country. (NYT, Nov. 2016)
4) Arthur Schlesinger: See this essay by Nathan Gardels, on Schlesinger’s 1992 book Disuniting America: Reflections on a multicultural society.
F) Here are some other lectures I’ve given on political psychology and polarization:
1) A lecture on political psychology I gave in Korea in 2015, on EBS, with Korean subtitles: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4.
Read More
Viewpoint Diversity in the Academy
Truth is a process, not just an end-state. The Righteous Mind was about the obstacles to that process, such as confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, tribalism, and the worship of sacred values. Given the many ways that our moral psychology warps our reasoning, it’s a wonder we’ve gotten as far as we have, as a species. That’s what’s so brilliant about science: it is a way of putting people together so that they challenge each other and cancel out each others’ confirmation biases and tribal commitments. The truth emerges from the interaction of flawed individuals.
But something alarming has happened to the academy since the 1990s. As the graph below shows, it has been transformed from an institution that leans to the left, which is not a big problem, into an institution that is almost entirely on the left, which is a very big problem.
Nowadays there are no conservatives or libertarians in most academic departments in the humanities and social sciences. (See Langbert, Quain, & Klein, 2016 for more recent findings on research universities; and see Langbert 2018 for similar findings in liberal arts colleges.) The academy has been so focused on attaining diversity by race and gender (which are valuable) that it has created a hostile climate for people who think differently. The American Academy has–arguably–become a politically orthodox and quasi-religious institution. When everyone shares the same politics and prejudices, the disconfirmation process breaks down. Political orthodoxy is particularly dangerous for the social sciences, which grapple with so many controversial topics (such as race, gender, poverty, inequality, immigration, and politics). America needs innovative and trustworthy research on all these topics, but can a social science that lacks viewpoint diversity produce reliable findings?
What I am trying to do
I am a non-partisan centrist, and I am very concerned about the loss of viewpoint diversity in the academy. I believe the problem is amplified by the rising political polarization of the United States more generally. I therefore teamed up with two dozen professors in psychology and other disciplines (most of whom are not conservative) to create the site HeterodoxAcademy.org. Our goal is to make the case, consistently and forcefully, that the academy must increase viewpoint diversity in order to function effectively. We launched the site in September 2015, just before a wave of student protests at Yale and other schools increased pressures toward political orthodoxy.
A) If you want to understand the cultural transformation that has occurred at American universities since the 1990s here is a list of my writings on the subject, augmented by some of the best essays by others:
1) The Coddling of the American Mind (2015, With Greg Lukianoff, in The Atlantic). This essay gives an overview of the new culture spreading across universities, in which a subset of students demand “safe spaces,” “trigger warnings,” and administrative mechanisms for cataloguing and punishing “micro-aggresssions.” We explain where this culture came from and why it is bad for the students’ own mental health, as well as being devastating to the free exchange of ideas upon which the pursuit of truth depends. In 2017 I followed up this line of argument in an essay co-written with Lenore Skenazy that showed how paranoid parenting and the loss of unsupervised play in childhood has created a fragile generation of kids that is receptive to the new safety culture. We show how this new culture may be making kids “too safe to succeed”
2) Where microaggressions really come from. (2015) This is my summary of an extraordinary essay by sociologists Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning. They show how a new “culture of victimhood” is emerging on America’s most progressive college campuses in which the main paths to gaining prestige are either to advertise one’s victimhood or to attack others in the name of defending victims. This culture weakens students and guarantees unending strife. This essay is essential reading for anyone who thinks that campus protesters’ demands for more sensitivity training, affirmative action, and ethnic studies centers are going to help future students feel less marginalized on campus. In fact, those measures are likely to backfire. College presidents and deans who accede to their demands are committing their institutions to a firmer embrace of victimhood culture, which means that in a few years they can expect: thinner skins, more anger, more feelings of marginalization, more accusations of racism/sexism, more restrictions on free speech, and more demands for… more victimhood culture. This could turn into a death spiral for any college that starts down this path. But once a university has lost its political diversity, there may be nobody left on campus who is willing to stand up and say “um, maybe this is a bad idea, here’s another way to look at things.” For more on microaggressions, see Lilienfeld’s 2017 analysis and critique of the concept, and my commentary on Lilienfeld, pointing out that microaggression training teaches the opposite of ancient wisdom.
3) True diversity requires generosity of spirit (2015). This is a case study of the most egregious witch-hunt so far — the persecution of dean Spellman at Claremont McKenna, for the crime of writing a helpful email with one ambiguous word. I say why current diversity approaches should be reconfigured around the principle of charity — we must give each other the benefit of the doubt if we are to live with diversity. (We have created the OpenMind Platform to do just that.)
4) How Marcuse made today’s students less tolerant than their parents (2015). by April Kelly-Woessner. Describes the resurgence of influence of Herbert Marcuse, who argued in the 1960s that true “liberating” tolerance requires suppressing all non-progressive voices. Kelly-Woessner shows the big split in American opinion on matters of free speech: Millennials embrace Marcusian ideals much more than did previous generations, and it is this moralistic illiberalism that leads to the witch-hunts and ultimatums that are sweeping across American college campuses since Halloween 2015. (Two months after Kelly-Woessner posted the essay, Pew research published strong confirmation of her argument: 40% of Millennials OK with limiting speech offensive to minorities).
5) The Yale problem begins in high school (2015). This is a report of a strange experience that happened to me when I gave a talk at a progressive private high school. I came to see that “the Yale problem” — the angry demands for changes that will make future generations even angrier — has its roots in high school. Many students at elite schools are learning to judge ideas not by their content but by the “privilege” or victimhood of the speaker. They arrive at Yale (and other colleges) unready to participate in a marketplace of ideas because they want adult authorities to ban many sellers from the marketplace before they deem it safe to enter. (This mentality is not found in most students, but those that hold it tend to have outsized influence on administrators who want to avoid controversy.)
6) How concept creep is closing down minds (2016). This is an essay I wrote with Nick Haslam in The Guardian (UK) explaining Haslam’s academic paper on “concept creep.” The campus trend to lower the bar on concepts useful for extending victimhood culture (e.g., bullying & trauma) may end up making students more fragile and depriving them of challenges to their favored ideas. For a condensed version of Haslam’s paper click here.
7) The split between the liberal left and the illiberal left. Jonathan Chait at New York Magazine has been calling attention to the growing illiberalism of one faction of the left since early 2015. See Not a Very P.C. Thing to Say. More recently, he has offered the most succinct explanation of the mindset of the illiberal left in this essay: Oh, Good, It’s 2016 and We’re Arguing About Whether Marxism Works: “The problem with Marxism, I argue, lies in its class-based model of economic rights. Liberalism believes in political rights for everybody, regardless of the content of their ideas. Marxists believe political rights belong only to those arguing on behalf of the oppressed — i.e., people who agree with Marxists.” This is exactly the Marcusian turn that many American universities are now taking. It is noteworthy that many true liberals–including Nick Kristof and president Obama–have urged students and universities to reject this illiberal turn and seek out political diversity.
8) Hard truths about race on campus (2016). This is an essay I wrote with Lee Jussim in The Wall Street Journal. As social psychologists, we are alarmed that so many college presidents are giving in to demands that they do things that are likely–based on existing imperfect evidence–to make things worse for everyone, especially black students. We urge universities to copy the example of the US Army: Use affirmative action but without lowering standards for any race; reduce or eliminate “ethnic enclaves;” and foster a sense of unity, not division. In a followup essay, I showed the amazing 1969 prophecy by judge Macklin Fleming, in which he predicted the problems that the use of large racial preferences would cause. His essay helps us see exactly how racial preferences have led to feelings of marginalization by black students, which has in turn led to a tense and politicized environment on campus that is hostile to free inquiry about politically controversial topics.
9) Intimidation is the new normal on campus. In 2017, in the wake of the election of Donald Trump, passions grew stronger and we began to see actual physical violence on campus as a response to speakers deemed unacceptable. The violence at UC Berkeley and at Middlebury was a wakeup call to many professors, and we saw a sharp rise in applications to join Heterodox Academy. In this essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education I explored the causes and implications of these trends. Even though actual violence is still rare, the fact that a non-orthodox speaker might draw a protest crowd, and the protest crowd might contain members of antifa (including some students) means that anyone who challenges the political consensus on campus must now at least think about issues of physical safety and be worried if a crowd of students approaches. It gets worse. As physical intimidation from students on the political left was increasing ON campus, threats of violence from the political right OFF campus were becoming much more common too, with death threats and racist slurs aimed at professors who said something provocative (and sometimes outrageous) that got picked up and sometimes distorted by right-wing media. I explained the causes and consequences of this alarming new development in a blog post at HxA titled Professors must now fear intimidation from both sides.
10) Are words violence? The second most unfortunate trend on campus in 2017, after the rise of actual violence, was the rapid spread of the idea that words are violence (and therefore, violence to stop people from speaking is justified self defense). An op-ed in the New York Times, by a psychologist I like and admire, tried to ground this argument on neuroscience: words can cause stress, stress can cause physical damage, therefore words can be violence. I thought the essay made some logical errors (words can cause physical harm, but that doesn’t mean that they are violent) and some psychological errors (such as misunderstanding antifragility, and recommending policies that would make students more fragile). I showed why the op-ed was wrong and harmful (but not violent) in an essay in The Atlantic, with Greg Lukianoff: Why its a bad idea to tell students words are violence.
B) If you want to understand the changes that have occurred in the social sciences, and how the loss of viewpoint diversity can sometimes damage the validity of the research, here is my suggested reading list:
1) Read our welcome letter at HeterodoxAcademy.org. Then explore the site. A few key postings are…
2) Political diversity will improve social psychological science. This is a condensed version of the paper I wrote with 5 colleagues documenting the loss of viewpoint diversity in social psychology, and the problems that has caused.
3) The Backstory of the AEI-Brookings Poverty Report. This essay shows the value of viewpoint diversity. It’s about how a deliberate decision to cultivate viewpoint diversity led to a breakthrough report on poverty, drawing on the best ideas from both sides.
C) If you want to read criticisms of me and my colleagues at Heterodox Academy, here are the major ones. (It’s really strange… there are occasional slurs but hardly any arguments have been offered against us.)
1) Kate Manne, Why I use trigger warnings. NYT. (my response is here)
2) Jason Stanley, The Free Speech Fallacy. Chronicle of Higher Ed.
3) Paul Krugman, Academics and Politics. NYT. (my response is here)
4) Jeffrey A. Sachs and Matt Yglesias each argued that there is no free speech crisis on campus, it’s just a moral panic. My response is here (with Sean Stevens).
D) If you want to DO something about the problem, and you teach or work at a university, college, or high school, consider assigning any of these resources to all students, in order to help them understand that truth is a process all-too-easily subverted by normal moral psychology:
1) The Righteous Mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion. (See here for why its a great book for a common read, relevant in many courses and departments)
2) The OpenMind Platform: A fun and powerful educational technology system that prepares students to benefit from viewpoint diversity.
3) All Minus One: John Stuart Mill’s Ideas on Free Speech, Illustrated A free ebook (or $3 Kindle book) to bring the best arguments ever made for free speech from the 19th century to the 21st century.
4) The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure. (Coming Sept. 4, 2018)
E) Here are the major talks I have given on viewpoint diversity. (You can find these and others on the viewpoint diversity playlist on my YouTube channel).
1) Why universities must choose one telos: Truth or social justice. (Talk at Duke, October, 2016) Here’s a blog post giving the background.
2) Coddle U. vs Strengthen U. (Talk at Yale, Sept. 2015) Here’s a blog post giving the background.
3) On the PBS NewsHour, talking about how viewpoint diversity led to the AEI-Brookings report on poverty and opportunity. [pbs page here]
4) My Wriston lecture at the Manhattan Institute, Nov. 2017, on “The age of outrage: What it’s doing to our universities, and our country”. My talk begins at 12:30. I explore the centrifugal forces tearing apart the United States, and then show how those forces are playing out on campus.
F) Here are some additional essays I have written on the topic:
Psychological science and viewpoint diversity. With Lee Jussim. Guest column in APS Observer, invited by Randy Gallistel, president of the Association for Psychological Science (2/1/16)
G) Here are some additional articles and interviews written by others related to matters of viewpoint diversity in the academy:
The Why Factor, BBC World Service, episode on Safe Spaces (6/6/16). (Student unions in the UK have embraced safe spaces and “no-platforming” of speakers with “objectionable” views.)
Universities should be dangerous places. Spiked (UK) podcast interview (4/10/16), gives an overview of the history of what has happened, and what it’s like to teach in a minefield.
Read More