Nice Squirrel
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http://chronicle.com/article/Social...rs/147957/?cid=gs&utm_source=gs&utm_medium=en
The Paper: http://journals.cambridge.org/images/fileUpload/documents/Duarte-Haidt_BBS-D-14-00108_preprint.pdf
Discuss.
The Chronicle of Higher Ed said:During a 2011 talk at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Jonathan Haidt asked the roughly 1,000 researchers gathered how many considered themselves liberal. About 800 hands went up. Twenty identified as "moderate or centrist"; 12 fessed up to libertarianism. The number of self-described conservatives in the room: three.
Out of a thousand.
Now a forthcoming paper in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences, written by Mr. Haidt and several co-authors, makes the case that ideological one-sidedness in social psychology is a genuine problem and offers suggestions for fixing it. The paper also singles out researchers that the authors believe are guilty of letting their leanings undermine the quality of their work.
The paper grew out of an essay by José Duarte that he posted on a social-psychology email list after Mr. Haidt’s impromptu survey of the field’s political loyalties. In the essay, Mr. Duarte, a graduate student at Arizona State University who is one of the new paper’s co-authors, offered the following principle: "If a research question requires that one assume that a particular ideology or value system is factually true, then that research question is invalid."
So what, specifically, does he mean by that? Mr. Duarte and his co-authors point to examples like a 2012 paper titled "Bright Minds and Dark Attitudes: Lower Cognitive Ability Predicts Greater Prejudice Through Right-Wing Ideology and Low Intergroup Contact." That paper, they argue, assumes that conservatives are indeed prejudiced. They suggest that a fairer way to frame that question would be to ask, "Which groups are targets of prejudice and intolerance across the political spectrum, and why?
The Paper: http://journals.cambridge.org/images/fileUpload/documents/Duarte-Haidt_BBS-D-14-00108_preprint.pdf
Discuss.