Behavioural and Brain sciences is a journal that specialises in 'controversial' research.
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayJournal?jid=BBS
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayJournal?jid=BBS
Behavioural and Brain sciences is a journal that specialises in 'controversial' research.
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayJournal?jid=BBS
I agree. In very broad terms I think liberals tend to think most people are good. Conservatives, tend to think we are all sinners in the eyes of god. Liberal think welfare is a good idea and if it's not working there needs to be more of it. Conservative tend to think people will game the system.
It's interesting to see how the liberal side is much more willing to question itself than the conservative side. For all their complaining about people considering themselves victims, conservatives are remarkably big on considering themselves victims.
I'll take it a bit further.
Liberals tend to think that people are simply a product of their environment. If the environment is good they'll be good, someone who behaves badly is because of a bad childhood somehow due to exploitation by business and needs help, not punishment. Ignore the fact that business is just people, if the people are good there will not be the exploitation.
Conservatives tend to think that people are generally bad unless pushed to be good by religion. Someone who ends up in a bad position is due to their own misdeeds (which may include laziness) and is never a product of their environment. Business is always good, ignore the fact that it's pretty hard for a bad people to create an ethical business.
What is a liberal bias?
Fifty years ago, the idea the blacks should be allowed to vote and attend integrated schools in the American South were liberal positions.
The ideas that women should vote, hold property in our names, and divorce abusive husband were at one time or another not merely liberal but radical beliefs.
Scientific racism held sway in the early social sciences and to say that race did not determine intelligence was heresy or at best hilarity.
Study and experiment lead to changes in theory and perceptions of reality. The truth does more than set you free, it changes how we think and what was radical to say yesterday, may be conventional wisdom today and an eccentric notion tomorrow.
This is nothing new but it has a lot of relevant to the atheist/skeptic movement.
Here some history of why I think there is a strong left leaning bias in the social sciences. I also think there is a publication bias based on the "consensus" of beliefs in sociology circles.
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I was digging into the the divide between Social Constructivists (SJW types) vs Evolutionary Psychology in the 1970s; basically a nature v nurture debate. This is important because it is also the division between the atheism+ people and the more science oriented skeptic/atheist/secular movement.
What I discovered is that much of this split can be traced back to 1975 with the publication of Sociobiology by E.O. Wilson. In this book Wilson made some very mild claims about genetics influencing behavior in animals but at the time the world of academia, deep in the radicalism of the 60s and civil rights movement, saw any attempt to consider genetic influences on behavior as little more than a Nazi eugenics program.
Into the fray step two atheist biologists: Steven J Gould and Richard Dawkins.
Gould sides up with the FAR political left and uses his influence to discredit anybody who dares suggest that genetics plays a role in behavior. Dawkins is on the other side with his recent publication of the Selfish Gene (1976). Consider at the time our public discourse had everything from the SLA, the Weathermen, Black Panthers to Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand all wrapped up in the fear nuclear war and Armageddon.
The social justice warriors of this time imagined they were fighting against a post-apocalyptic world of eugenics and totalitarian ideologies.
Dawkins and Gould would battle over these issues for decades until Gould died and Dawkins became an icon of the atheist movement.
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The liberal side tends to hold that human nature is a social construct and that with just the right policies (always dictated by them), then humanity can be perfected (hence the focus on social justice policies) They tend to reject the notion of 'human-nature'. People on the right tend to accept the idea of human nature and see the left's attempt at social engineering as dangerous and wrong headed. Because of this view, they prefer to develop laws and institutions to control or punish the worse of human nature (hence the focus on law enforcement).
I think they are both nuts and that we need to have an evidence based sociology. We need "reals over feels."
I think that there is a lot to the idea that certain professions tend to self-select based on the nature of the work. I don't believe that many conservatives become sociologists or many liberals become economists or engineers.
This thread is an excellent example of the problem described by this thread. We've achieved recursion.
What is a liberal bias?
Fifty years ago, the idea the blacks should be allowed to vote and attend integrated schools in the American South were liberal positions.
The ideas that women should vote, hold property in our names, and divorce abusive husband were at one time or another not merely liberal but radical beliefs.
Scientific racism held sway in the early social sciences and to say that race did not determine intelligence was heresy or at best hilarity.
Study and experiment lead to changes in theory and perceptions of reality. The truth does more than set you free, it changes how we think and what was radical to say yesterday, may be conventional wisdom today and an eccentric notion tomorrow.
What is a liberal bias?
Fifty years ago, the idea the blacks should be allowed to vote and attend integrated schools in the American South were liberal positions.
The ideas that women should vote, hold property in our names, and divorce abusive husband were at one time or another not merely liberal but radical beliefs.
Scientific racism held sway in the early social sciences and to say that race did not determine intelligence was heresy or at best hilarity.
Study and experiment lead to changes in theory and perceptions of reality. The truth does more than set you free, it changes how we think and what was radical to say yesterday, may be conventional wisdom today and an eccentric notion tomorrow.
AthenaAwakened (awesome name, btw) I think that you've confused liberal positions with liberal biases in the context of research. All of the concepts that you've outlined are positions that were considered liberal at the time they were first introduced. But that's not what the OP was addressing.
The OP is addressing the concept of introducing bias into research. For the moment, let's set aside any particular political affiliation, and approach it from a less sensitive topic. Let's say... Ice cream . Let's say that you like chocolate ice cream, and I like strawberry, and we disagree on which one is the best. So I decide to have a poll of all of our fellow board members. So I ask them to choose from the flowing statements:
I think you can agree that this is pretty shoddy research, right? What I've done, in a ridiculously blatant way here, is to introduce my own personal bias into my research. I've phrased the poll question in such a way that my beliefs are reflected - and in doing so, there's an emotional content introduced into the questions that is likely to lead the poll takers to respond in a non-neutral fashion. The results of this poll are likely to be skewed because the design of the poll is biased by my belief and my preference.
- Strawberry is the best ice cream, because the light and refreshing fruit flavor is reminiscent of summer and childhood.
- Chocolate is the best ice cream, because the poop color makes me feel like eating my own feces.
That's what the OP was addressing. It's not addressing the positions being measured by the research, or the response of the populace to those positions. It's addressing the framing and the assumptions that go into the development of the surveys - The bias in the research itself.
Now, the example that I gave was of course blatant and easy. In reality, it can often be very difficult to keep bias out of survey design. Assumptions and beliefs are very difficult to reign in, especially the kind that underlie how people think about the world, because most of the time we don't even realize those are assumptions. That's just "how it is". But I do agree that in social science, it would behoove the researchers to put a bit more effort into maintaining a neutral approach to their research. Just for the sake of doing better science
It's specifically social psychology.
It's specifically social psychology.
Oh.
That's like pondering why there aren't more creationists in the crowd when a bunch of biologists get together, then.
I kinda get the feeling you think one side is a little nuttier than the other.
Just an observation.
It means that right wingers tend to be more stupid and not understand how research works due to their stupidity, so when research results say something negative about them they figure the problem is the research and not them ... because they're stupid.
One cannot have intelligent discussions with stupid people.
I don't have a definitive answer, but I wouldn't be even a little bit surprised to find that certain types of fields attract different predispositions. At heart, the divide between ideologies I think has more to do with how people think, how they view the world, and how they approach problem-solving than anything else. And that would naturally lend itself to differing interests in different fields.
That being said, I think they still have a duty to ensure that the research they are doing is unbiased and isn't introducing skew into the questions that they are asking. They should be testing a hypothesis, not confirming an assumption