I was denied admission to a PhD program because of my perceived political views: reflections of a sellout; how diversity would strengthen social science (Updated)

 Some of my mentors advised me to take down the post from July 22, 2014 about discrimination because it would hurt me in the job market – that hiring committees would discriminate against me (again) for my perceived political views, or would discriminate against me for documenting past discrimination.

So I took it down last week. I now think that was a terrible mistake. People were looking for the post to cite in journal articles and e-mailed me to ask where it was. That sparked more reflection on this issue. This post is the result.

I think I sold out, and I will not do it again. I've reposted the discrimination story below. If modern American academia is so intellectually emaciated that they would discriminate against someone for having criticized something Jimmy Carter said seven years ago, well... I don't have a closing clause for that sentence.

This is ridiculous in part because there's really nothing to see here. There are no raging politics here. There's not much ideology at play. I'm not a conservative (not that there's anything wrong with that), or a theist (not that there's anything wrong with that). This could be an issue only in an incredibly tribal ideological environment, and I think most academic departments are operating at a higher level than that (i.e. I don't think discrimination will cripple my career.)

Discrimination against dissenting voices harms the field, and is morally repugnant. Let me offer some reasons why.

Our upcoming paper in Behavioral and Brain Sciences documents the impact political bias has had on the validity of some social science research (only some.) Of all the points we make in the paper, I care most about the practices that undermine scientific validity (and much of my focus was on that section). I care about the validity issues far, far more than I care about the political demographics of the field, how those demographics have changed over time, issues of hostile climate, or discrimination. Validity is everything. Science is centrally about method – valid methods.

I'm appalled at the idea that I could be excluded from the field for writing about my past discrimination, or for pointing out scientific scams, or for writing what I'm writing now. We need more diverse voices in social science. We need them for functional scientific reasons. Ideally, politics should have no place, and if there's anything I would change about the paper, it's that we focused on politics as the only level of analysis. We spoke of political diversity. I would have preferred to focus on intellectual diversity – to also get at deeper levels of analysis where there the field is homogeneous in some of its assumptions about human nature, the inferences that can be drawn from certain inferential statistics, and the particular brand of empiricism we operate with. We voted on most things, and I lost that vote. The paper is outstanding, far better than anything I could have produced without my collaborators, so I don't care too much about that omission. My point is just that this is deeper than politics, that my focus is more at the level of methodological validity, not simple political bias.

In the present era, political ideology is remarkably influential in academia. And it's one ideology in particular, which raises several challenges. Ideological assumptions are baked into research questions and measures in ways that I doubt the researchers are even aware of in many cases. Given the starting conditions of ideological homogeneity, this is inevitable if we assume human researchers with normal human minds. We need people in the field who can call out bias, and who can articulate why a method is invalid. We need people who will call out cases where human beings have been harmed by research that falsely linked them to damaging beliefs because they happened to be conservatives. A vigorous science needs a wide range of vigorous voices. Mexicans have some utility here. And we benefit from researchers who investigate prejudice toward overachieving minorities (some of my empirical work) instead of looking exclusively at prejudice toward poorer minorities (if you think poverty is ipso facto interesting and exclusively important, you're operating with some ideological assumptions, not a descriptive framework.)

Examples of the bias and its consequences

1. We've got researchers asking participants if hard work tends to pay off in the long run and labeling it "rationalization of inequality" if they say yes (Napier & Jost, 2008). In that same paper, they also measured simple attitudes toward various forms of inequality, and treated those attitudes as, again, "rationalization of inequality". By pure fiat, by a wave of the hand, they converted an established attitudes measure into a measure of rationalization of those same attitudes, with no attempt to measure rationalization. So a non-leftist attitude is rationalization, by definition apparently. That's incredible.

2. We've also got researchers asking participants if they agree with the analogy "The earth is like a crowded spaceship with limited room and resources", and calling it "denial of environmental realities" if they say no (Feygina, Jost, & Goldsmith, 2010). In other words, we've got people treating ideological canards as descriptive realities. Even analogies are being confused for facts. Analogies. The inability to distinguish between 1) ideological tenets, value judgements, and favored analogies, and 2) descriptive, observable reality is an epistemic and scientific collapse. The importance of that distinction can't be overstated. Scientists have to be able to tell the difference. Social science is especially vulnerable to this conflation, so social scientists should be most alert to it. This collapse might be limited to a couple of labs, but if we don't address it and eliminate it, our standing as a scientific field will be at risk.

3. We've got people reporting that Americans would prefer a flatter income distribution, when in reality they asked participants to imagine a universe where their own incomes would be randomly determined – i.e. a casino universe (Norton & Ariely, 2011).

Actually, I was wrong about the Norton and Ariely paper. They also asked participants for their preferences in a non-Rawlsian, real-world context, so I've deleted the remainder of this section. I apologize to Michael Norton and Dan Ariely for the error. It was inexplicable and inexcusable. (Joe Duarte -- October 20, 2015.)

4. We've got people measuring a purported fundamental personality trait of Openness to Experience by asking participants "I see myself as someone who..."

... is ingenious, a deep thinker.

... values artistic, esthetic experiences.

... is inventive.

... is sophisticated in art, music, and literature.

... likes to reflect, play with ideas


You've got to be kidding. These items are obviously grounded in – and biased in favor of – academia. This core personality trait of "openness" is measuring intellectualism and urban sophistication. These items are invalid on their face, and should not have lasted this long.

How are people in rural communities going to show up on this scale? How about people in developing countries? How would they express their openness to experience? Where do we give them a voice? They don't have opera houses, symphonies, and gallery openings with which to express their "sophistication" in art, music, and literature. They're structurally excluded and marginalized here. The items are not situated at the level of analysis necessary for a valid underlying human personality construct that is commensurable across cultures and backgrounds. We're not even speaking their language. I guarantee that many people in rural communities would be embarrassed to say that they are "ingenious" or "sophisticated". It would be unseemly to them, narcissistic and snobby. They might never use words like esthetic or inventive, not because they're stupid, but because they live in a different world and don't necessarily have use for the same terminology that contemporary intellectuals use.

This is deeply offensive. We're denying these people a voice. I grew up in a rural copper mining town with a population of 2,000. I know these people. I am one of these people. The bias of these items should be obvious to anyone, but it will be most obvious to people who never lived within 100 miles of an opera house. If openness is a real personality trait (I doubt it), commensurable across cultures, then we might ask them:

If they enjoy learning new things from their kids.

If they enjoy looking at the stars at night (FYI, seeing the stars well outside of a city is a radically different, much more powerful experience)

If they enjoy being in the woods.

If they enjoy the tranquility of being on a boat at the lake.

If they enjoy figuring out how something works and repairing it, physical things, like car engines, transmissions, or TVs.

If they enjoy the uplifting experience of church.

If they enjoy reading.

Note also that rural communities are likely to be conservative, and urban sophisticates are likely to be liberal or libertarian, so we've rigged a systematic political bias against conservatives showing up on our "openness" measure. The fact that conservatives score lower on openness is widely reported and savored by politically biased and incurious science writers and sloppy scientists. Take another look at the items. That's what "openness" is. That's what conservatives are scoring lower on. It's urban intellectualism and perhaps narcissism. Given its profound cultural bias, we have no justification for calling it openness.

5. Duke political scientist Evan Charney makes some powerful points in his upcoming commentary on our BBS paper. He reports that the longer version of the five-factor personality measure – the NEO PI-R – includes the following items in its Openness to Experience scale:

I believe that we should look to our religious authorities for decisions on moral issues.

I believe the new morality of permissiveness is no morality at all.

I believe that the different ideas of right and wrong that people in other societies have may be right for them.

In what sense do any of these items bear on a personality construct we would call openness to experience? "Openness to experience" here is isomorphic with liberalism. These are political and philosophical positions. The first item is a measure of traditional religious faith. The second measures endorsement of moral subjectivism, which has become popular in academia. The third measures endorsement of cultural relativism, which has become popular in academia. This is pure politics. As we saw above with the other studies, liberal ideological tenets are being smuggled into the measures like jail cake. Openness to experience is simply being defined as one's agreement with the ideological framework favored by contemporary American academic culture. This is nonsense. There's no science here.

Why would they?

There's been lots of noise lately about how conservatives don't respect science or the intellectual sphere. Why would they? They know we're politically biased. They know that today's academic and scientific communities are dominated by liberals and leftists. They're not morons. Anyone who has lived a significant number of adult years is going to have common sense intuitions and wisdom about the nature of human bias and human frailty – intuitions that are fully validated by decades of flagship social psychology research on motivated reasoning and assorted cognitive biases. They know we're biased. They know that academia doesn't like them, doesn't respect them or their values. Why in the hell would they trust us? Why would they trust us given that we measure openness – and loudly report their paucity of it – based on self-reported "sophistication"? Vanity is a vice to them. In what universe, given what priors, would it be rational for members of one subculture to flatly believe everything scientists claim when they know that science is dominated by a subculture that despises them?

Conservative distrust of academia is trivially easy to justify given what we know about bias – and what they know about bias. Let me remind you of examples 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 above – that is what we do. Our bias isn't conjecture – it's simply a fact (and to be fair, we should expect any homogeneous ideological or intellectual community to be biased, and for some of those biases to be deeply embedded, nonconscious, or implicit, given basic facts about human nature – I don't assume that liberalism is itself to blame.) Given all of this, it makes perfect sense that the most highly educated conservatives are the most distrustful of academia (see Kahan.) It seems eminently rational and wise. They would have to be dimwitted to trust us given the basic facts here.

Taxonomy

The above examples are profound errors. They undermine the validity of the studies, and they are pervasive. It's important that these errors be caught and eliminated. They're too large, too severe, for a modern science. Our errors need to be much smaller. The field as it stands doesn't catch these errors, and these studies are published in top journals. No one has attended to these issues, or developed the underlying epistemological framework that social science may need to prevent them. We lack a taxonomy with which we could better classify and understand these validity issues. We don't even have labels for these phenomena, and that cripples us. Human cognition is heavy on categorization and conceptualization (and those are often isomorphic, in that having a concept for something serves to categorize it, like how the concept "flower" bundles together all past, present, and future flowers as a category of thing, and distinguishes flowers from trees, pine cones, and hot dogs.) Humans have a hard time grappling with things for which they have no ready concept or label (see Lisa Feldman Barrett's wonderful work on how having a concept for an emotion – a word for it – shapes whether and how we experience that emotion). I think my methodological work here is valuable to social science, especially the upcoming systematic integration of these issues into an epistemological taxonomy, the new statistical methods, etc.

Moving on...

6. And of course we've got people linking climate skepticism to belief that the moon landings were a hoax when only 3 out of 1145 mysterious blog survey participants took those positions (Lewandowsky, Oberauer, & Gignac, 2012). This can't happen. It harms innocent people. We simply can't go around harming innocent people, certainly not our participants. Free market endorsement was linked to rejection of the HIV-AIDS link when 95% of free market endorsers agreed with the HIV-AIDS link. We might linger on the impact such a planted link might have on people's dating prospects and romantic lives. These false and incredibly damaging links were widely reported in the media. Not just by hacks like Chris Mooney, but by The New York Times and Scientific American.

No one looked at the data, except for climate skeptics, and they were ignored. No one in the field called out the scam. Quite the contrary – the Association for Psychological Science proudly reported the false findings in its news magazine, and fabricated new ones. They just made up findings that were never reported in the paper, and which are completely false, such as that endorsement of free markets predicted belief in the MLK assassination conspiracy and the moon hoax nonsense. There were no such links in the data. In fact, free market endorsement was negatively correlated with belief in the MLK conspiracy, and uncorrelated with the moon business. APS just made it up. They committed incredible, incomprehensible fraud. They've also refused to correct it, which any random small-town newspaper would do. I've never heard of a scientific body fabricating findings whole cloth. It's deeply disorienting, makes me want to double-check my sensory perception and connection with reality. How could APS fabricate? Who fabricates? Someone needs to either purge APS of those fraudsters, or purge the S and revisit their legal classification as a 501(c)(3). (More on the APS fraud next week.)

Apolitically, we've got researchers misusing statistics, from linear correlation to mediation to SEM, to make inferences that do not follow from those methods. Correlations are often converted into likelihoods, by both scientists and science writers. For example, if X is positively correlated with Y, people are taking this to mean that if a person is high on X, they're likely to be high on Y. This is wildly incorrect. Most researchers know this, but we're not doing anything to correct those who don't and science writers who convert our correlations into likelihoods, like Adam Corner. We've got lots of significant correlations that are driven by variance on one side of a scale, which will impact the inferences we can make from them. In general, natural human languages (e.g. English) aren't very good at describing probabilistic truths, which are the only kinds of truths we report. This is a deeply interesting issue to me, and I plan to do a lot of work there.

Conclusion

We need more researchers and scholars to identify these issues. We need to invite them in, not keep them out. We need more social psychologists who grew up in rural communities. We need people who are willing and able to advance our epistemological framework, and thus our science. As a field, we need to understand that the breadth and depth of fruitful scholarly inquiry might extend far beyond any present-day political ideology. And really, we do need more Mexicans, more African-Americans, and perhaps most of all more Native Americans. I know of two Mexican social psychology faculty in America. Two isn't enough. There are too many obvious vulnerabilities in doing behavioral science from the perspective of one culture.

I was deeply disturbed at the discrimination I've experienced in part because the loud commitment to racial-ethnic diversity was instantly sacrificed in favor of prejudice against a perceived conservative. It made the field's commitment to bringing in people of color and first-generation Americans seem less than serious, a subordinate and symbolic proxy for ideological conformity. An empirical field needs to put ideology in its proper place, which is no place at all. And my ethnicity is perhaps not unrelated to my willingness to speak out. Embracing diversity means embracing cultural differences, and those differences will manifest at multiple levels of analysis, in all sorts of domains. I'm not sure people think through what diversity means on the ground. The passivity of the field with respect to calling out scams and fraud might well be related to the dominant racial culture of the field, or a subculture, and people of different races and cultures might have different comfort levels with confrontation, directness, and so forth. Or not. It's an empirical question. No hay peor lucha que la que no se hace.

In any case, discriminating against me is discriminating against a person who brings a different racial-ethnic cultural background, one that the field severely lacks and has committed to including. Discriminating against me is discriminating against a person who brings a rural background, another underrepresented perspective in the field. It's discriminating against the son of immigrants, another dimension of inclusion marked by the field. It's discriminating against a person for whom English was a second language. It's discriminating against someone who brings a different intellectual framework, who won't have the some assumptions – both explicit and implicit – that prevail in our field.

Every single one of these dimensions of inclusion and diversity has functional, scientific, empirical value to the field. Those underrepresented dimensions will lead to new hypotheses, new discoveries, and more reliable identification of invalid and biased work. I trust that the six substantive examples I gave, and the various other reflections, were clearly articulated and satisfied the standards of intellectual rigor and insight that would be expected of a member of the academy. I trust that we agree that the practices I pointed out were worth pointing out. I trust that it's clear that a decision to discriminate against me is a decision to have a less diverse and less vibrant social science, and that such discrimination would vividly contradict the field's explicit and resounding commitments to diversity and inclusion. If it's going to happen again, if any scholar is inclined to ignore the merit in my contributions out of resentment, tribalism, or partisan political antipathy, be sure to clean your mirrors.

We were born in an arbitrary place and time – this one. There were never any guarantees. The state of social science is free to vary along those dimensions of place and time. There is no reason to assume that an early 21st-century social science dominated by a particular political ideology and the residue of postmodernism is the Platonic height of behavioral science. There's work to be done, and I'd very much appreciate the opportunity to do some of it.


The original post from July, 2014

I was denied admission to a graduate program because of my political views

Actually, it may have been more my perceived views than my actual views.

Now that the BBS paper is posted, I'll tell this story briefly (we cut it from the paper.) Some social psychologists have been skeptical of the idea that people in the field suffer discrimination due to their dissent from left-wing politics, even after many social psychologists explicitly said they would discriminate (against conservatives in particular.) Some skeptics have demanded systematic evidence of actual discrimination, which is a bit cheeky of them, since we know that such evidence is almost theoretically impossible to collect (especially in an academic field, given its career structure and stark power imbalances.) But I can offer one account.

I applied to several PhD programs in Social Psychology, and was accepted by Berkeley, Arizona State, and UNC - Chapel Hill.

At another program, the faculty had apparently seen my blog (an old blog that I canned later that year). Among posts about my recent marathon experience, I had posted about the mass resignation of all fourteen Jewish members of the board of advisors of the Carter Center, former President Jimmy Carter's nonprofit. They resigned because Carter's new book seemed to suggest that Palestinian terrorist bombings of Israeli civilian targets were justified until a Palestinian state was established, or a particular type of peace accord was accepted by Israel.

In my post, I supported the board members and criticized Carter's apparent tolerance of terrorism¹. On a phone interview, a faculty member from the social psychology program directly asked me about this blog post (and no others.) She also asked if I "really" felt that way about Jimmy Carter. She also openly stated that all of the faculty in the program had a problem with my post, except for her (it would've been 4 - 6 other professors), and that they all opposed my entry into the program. From her questions, I got the impression that my politics needed to clarified and vetted before final decisions were made. They subsequently denied me admission, with no further interaction or visits. (If it matters, this program was somewhat less selective and prestigious than the programs that accepted me.)

That was an extremely awkward phone call. I was blindsided, was not at all prepared to talk about politics or my precise feelings toward Jimmy Carter. It's the kind of thing that could not happen in a normal professional environment, and would give HR people nightmares if it did. Nothing like this ever happened before my entry into academia. That she was willing to openly discuss the fact that the faculty opposed me because of my apparent political views, and was willing to actively probe my political views, speaks volumes. The academic climate with respect to political/intellectual diversity is much like the Mad Men universe with respect to women – blind, clueless.

During the call, I got the impression that they thought / were worried that I was a conservative. The horror. I'm a secular libertarian, but many academic ideologues don't make such distinctions. They're not very aware of the intellectual landscape², know little of the enormous volume of space in that landscape outside of the modern leftist framework, and they collapse it into binary us/them boxes. You're either with them, or you're with Sarah Palin / Glenn Beck. (FYI, I know very little about Glenn Beck and his intellectual crimes – I just know they hate him.) Note that it was siding with a bunch of liberals who served on the board of the Carter Center that got me in trouble, along with direct criticism of Carter. Remarkably narrow straits...

1. I oppose murder, and mass murder, and I think one of the absolute tragedies of our era is how casually we justify mass killings, or ignore them, when they're distant from our daily lives – and how mass killings are so easily legitimized by politics. Killing a person is an enormous thing – there's nothing more enormous, and nothing more irreversible. The amount of suffering in the world staggers me, and can paralyze me if I let it – especially all the killing. If we target an alleged terrorist in some hardscrabble village in Yemen with a drone strike, and we also kill his kids, or his neighbor, or the mailman... that's an absolute catastrophe, a rupture in the universe. TV stations should cut to the news of the catastrophe – it should be as big as a space shuttle blowing up. We should know their names, and we should be in their debt, their families' debt. But there's so much of it, that we don't know their names, we don't pay our debt, and I feel terrible going back to coding data in SPSS. Steven Pinker is right that violence is down wordwide, but 1 is a towering number – if you're a just a kid, your whole life ahead of you, you should never be blown up while eating lunch with your family, so that we can get Israel to the bargaining table. So yeah, I was very disturbed by Carter's statements.

2. It's also worth noting that one's intellectual or philosophical framework need not give rise to a political identity. I'm not comfortable with politics being used as the primary sorting variable in the intellectual sphere. People don't have to care about politics, and separately, they don't need to have an easily labeled political identity that neatly fits the political terrain of our era. Many scholars and scientists do not fit into such schemas. (Politics as a sphere is central to the modern left in part because their ideology includes explicit and specific claims about the force of politics and power structures – life is largely about politics in that frame. Most of the forces in people's lives are attributed to politics, privilege, discrimination, and so forth, and there isn't a whole lot going on in human affairs that isn't political, at least not that they talk about.)