In an article titled "Social Scientist Sees Bias Within" in this Monday's New York Times, John Tierney discussed the biases that keep moral conservatives out of the field of social psychology. Most significantly, Tierney points to University of Virginia professor Dr. Jonathan Haidt's assertion that social psychologists have created a "tribal-moral community" that makes it almost impossible for social conservatives to find a niche in the field. This difficulty has greater implications than mere exclusion. Social psychology is concerned with understanding the mechanisms of social injustice in hopes of neutralizing it. Thus, in a scientific field focused on addressing discrimination and marginalization, the exclusion of a certain sector of the population is positively hypocritical. Additionally, this practical absence of conservatism cripples the acquisition of knowledge about social norms and injustices. As some researchers interviewed by The Times assert, experiments that could greatly contribute to the general base of scientific knowledge are never performed for fear that the work will not be published in an unreceptive professional climate.
Aside from the paradox that arises from social scientists' inability to recognize their own professional biases, their intolerance of socially conservative views hinders their ability to better understand the 42 percent of the United States population that identifies itself as conservative (as opposed to the 20 percent that identifies as liberal and 35 percent that identifies as moderate, according to a 2010 Gallup survey). Furthermore, this lack of ideological diversity amongst social psychologists undermines a great deal of their findings. If scientists undertake experiments to corroborate preconceived biases, they will always manage to extract the confirmation they seek. The type of ideological diversity that social psychologists seem to have all but eradicated from their field is essential for truly rigorous hypothesis testing to occur.
Such a state of affairs is troubling to say the least, but the real reason this article caught my attention was because it parallels a phenomenon I have witnessed repeatedly on the Dartmouth campus. In our increasingly socio-politically liberal corner of the world, many Dartmouth students have fooled themselves into believing that being ideologically liberal is synonymous with being a tolerant person. Unfortunately, I have found the opposite to be true in many cases. The most salient examples are the rampant attacks many Dartmouth students make on Roger Lott, a freshman opinion columnist for The Dartmouth. As much as one may not agree with Lott's opinions, the fact that he is so narrow-mindedly lambasted in public forums by commentators who refuse to so much as give their names is simply embarrassing. Such immature treatment of disparate viewpoints prevents people from achieving the understanding that our liberal arts education purports to instill in us. This understanding requires us to fully engage with starkly disparate opinions by thoughtfully considering both their merits and flaws. Too many Dartmouth students are shockingly comfortable neglecting this process.
This narrow-mindedness is especially dangerous because it neglects to acknowledge the limits of individual experience. I wonder how much our individual and collective understanding would increase if people willingly acknowledged that the real truth might lie somewhere between their own opinions and those that seem antithetical to them. If people were able to express their personal beliefs without fear of crucifixion they would assert their own opinions more freely. In turn, this broader sharing of diverse perspectives would deepen our community's ability engage with unfamiliar and potentially unsettling ideas.
Unfortunately, neither Dartmouth students nor the social psychologists that are supposed to help eradicate social injustice seem to have learned this lesson. As a result, research intended to help society overcome prejudices and discrimination only creates new ones. And because this research is dispensed as objective scientific knowledge, it only reinforces the biases of sociopolitical liberals like the most Dartmouth students. Something must be done about such sanctioned narrow-mindedness or it will thoroughly bias our intellectual cannon.
Real truth and understanding can only arise from conscientious analysis of all well-reasoned and evidenced arguments regardless of how different they may be from our own.
