Why Is the Fight for Free Speech Led by the Psychologists?

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DR. STOCKMANN: It’s my own fault. I should have faced them down long ago—shown my teeth—and bite back! Call me an enemy of society! So help me God, I’m not going to swallow that!

MRS. STOCKMANN: But Thomas dear, your brother does have the power—

DR. STOCKMANN: Yes, but I’m in the right!

MRS. STOCKMANN: The right? Ah… what does it help to be in the right if you don’t have any power?

 On twitter, Jeffrey Sachs presents a puzzle:

Here’s a puzzle I think about a lot. If any academic field is associated with the contemporary debate surrounding free speech, it’s psychology. Haidt, Pinker, Peterson, Saad, Jussim, even Lehmann. All specialize or have backgrounds in academic psych. So what’s the puzzle?

If psychology has any core premise, it is that we do not observe or make sense of the world unmediated. Our brains “get in the way”, both for good and for ill. Our biases, habits, and biologies shape what we’re willing to do, say, or believe.

I don’t have an answer, just some very uncharitable guesses about psychologists as historically ignorant cognitive elitists who would blanche if forced to grapple with the actual existing nature of American political discourse. Like I said, uncharitable.[1]

For a fuller introduction to the folks mentioned in the post: Jonathan Haidt is on the short-list for “world’s most renowned social psychologist.” His research has focused on the psychology of happiness and the psychology of different moral systems. Steven Pinker‘s research originally focused on psycholinguistics, but he first became famous for several well written works of popular science that present the principle findings of cognitive and evolutionary psychology to a lay audience. Jordan Peterson is a personality psychologist whose academic articles typically explored  applications of the “Big-5” personality metric or investigated the physiological foundations of alcoholism. His favorite intellectual project (the subject of both his first book and a series of YouTube lectures) is leveraging advances in affective neuroscience and evolutionary psychology to rehabilitate Jungian theories of the mind. Gad Saad made his name investigating the evolutionary origins of and cognitive processes behind consumer behavior. His work marries marketing with evolutionary psychology. Lee Jusim is a social psychologist who specializes in the psychology of stereotypes. He was a pioneer in effectively incorporating field research into a laboratory-driven discipline. Finally, Claire Lehmann is the founder and editor of Quillette, a web magazine that regularly highlights the work of (and has been endorsed by more than a few of) all the other folks on this list. Before founding Quillette, Lehmann was studying psychology as a grad student, a pursuit she ended upon giving birth to her first child.

That is the academic background of the people on Sach’s list. What earns them a spot on that list, however, is the other side of their biographies. Each of these individuals has moved from academic research to political advocacy. Though their arguments differ in style and intensity, these men and women have thrust themselves into the public eye in defense of academic freedom, ideological diversity, free speech, and political moderation, while attacking critical theory, post-modernism, and the excesses of the social justice left. They are not the only people to do this. But Sack is correct: the ranks of the culture warriors are filled with an unusual number of behavioral scientists.

Why?

I attribute this all to three things.

1. The conclusions academics reach tend to rankle the right. There are exceptions. If your research draws on evolutionary psychology, focuses on innate behavioral differences, or touches any sort of psychometrics (e.g., IQ), the angry tide does not sweep in from the right. The wave these men and women fear crashes in from leftward side. Moreover, the sort of leftist opposition that the academic consensus on these topics face leaves little room for rational debate or compromise: controversies over psychometrics or evolutionary psychology are usually framed in terms of good and evil, not right and wrong. The scientists involved are to be conquered, not reasoned with.

So that is point one: the people who want to shut controversial psychologists up are overwhelmingly creatures of the left.

2. Psychology, especially social psychology, is itself an overwhelmingly leftist discipline. We actually have data on this, and it is pretty grim: a recent survey of American tenure-track professors reveals that there 17.4 registered Democrat psychologists for every single registered Republican.[2] If there is a field of people who ought to be sympathetic to social justice railroading, these people are it.

3. Despite this, behavioral scientists have not yet adopted the rhetorical techniques or method of inquiry of “critical theory.”  In contrast, see how these modes of inquiry have swallowed up the fields of anthropology and communications, and established creeping colonies in history, sociology, and area studies.  Given the left-leaning sympathies of almost all in the profession, the threat that the same might happen to the study of human behavior is real.

I use the word ‘threat’ consciously. That is how the people on this list perceive critical theory and the popular culture it supports. For men like Peterson or Haidt these ideas actually damage the psychological health of those ‘indoctrinated’ into them. Pinker and his type are less dramatic: they see critical theory and its attachments mostly as cruddy methodology. The threat it poses is to the scientific endeavor itself. Implicit in their view are two beliefs: first, that there is real ‘truth’ out there to be discovered; second, that if scientists are allowed to proceed in their debates without outside interference, they will eventually discover it.

This is key. Haidt et. al. do not just believe that critical theorists are wrong—they believe that the critical theorists can be proven wrong. If science does its thing, the bad theories and methods cannot last. That is the lesson they have taken from the replication crisis: behavioral science self corrects.   Uncomfortable data and uncomfortable arguments have the power to force change. Given enough time researchers will converge upon the truth. (Side note: social psychology’s largely successful attempt to improve itself over the last decade and fix the gross methodological problems it used to be saddled with is, IMHO, an important counter-point to Sach’s pessimism, and a big part of this story).

But all of this is true if and only if scientists are allowed to debate and investigate freely.

Haidt et. al. are confident they can win the debate if they are allowed to debate. For the heterodox anthropologist or sociologist the game is already over: their discipline has already been conquered. For the economist, the threat is too remote to take seriously. Behavioral science exists in that rare in-between: methodologically, it has the tools to fight back against the excesses of the activist. Socially, it provides a compelling reason for its practitioners to use them.

[1] Jeffrey Sachs, twitter comments (12:35 PM, 2 Nov 2018)

[2] That number is taken from Mitchell Langbert, Anthony J. Quain, and Daniel B. Klein, “Faculty Voter Registration in Economics, History, Journalism, Law, and Psychology,” Econ Journal Watch, vol 13, iss 3, 422-451. See also Duarte et. al, “Political Diversity Will Improve Social Psychological Science,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences (2014), 1–54; Yoel Inbar and Joris Lammers, “Political Diversity in Social and Personality Psychology, Perspectives on Psychological Science, vol 7, 496-503.