[fecklessyouth]

>The N.Y.U. political psychologist John Jost made the point even more strongly, calling Haidt’s remarks “armchair demography.” Jost wrote, “Haidt fails to grapple meaningfully with the question of why nearly all of the best minds in science find liberal ideas to be closer to the mark with respect to evolution, human nature, mental health, close relationships, intergroup relations, ethics, social justice, conflict resolution, environmental sustainability, and so on.”

A comment meant to combat Haidt's criticism ends up embodying it.

[wfo]

There is something to be said for the notion that professors or any public intellectual will bias away from conservatism -- it is the job of a public intellectual in the humanities or social sciences (at least public intellectuals of the past, before non-academics with business degrees took over any and all decision-making in American research institutions) to think critically about and challenge the status quo and the general structure of society, and conservatives almost by definition support the status quo, so it is altogether unsurprising to see fewer conservatives in professorial positions in these disciplines.

However I think here the issue is that the lack of conservatives in social psychology obscures the fact that it is a discipline with almost no real content -- they ask questions and do studies which can provide any result they wish, so the group of people engaged in the science just imprint their own beliefs on it -- getting 'data' and 'studies' that exactly conform with their worldview, not coincidentally. In order to provide basic rigor to the science (and to provide any hope of ending the current replication crisis) there needs to be scientists employing the same methods but who expect radically different (socially conservative) outcomes. Currently the best way to see which method or explanation a psychology study finds evidence for is not to read the study, but rather to read the bio of the first author, and find his or her pet theory. This is the problem at hand. The lack of intellectual diversity in the discipline just allows the intellectual farce to plod along unexposed.