I agree that much of the social sciences is not science, and the results of the OP study suggests that Women's studies and Sociology are generally rife with people who fail to approach some key questions in their fields in a scientific way.
That seems to exist all over the spectrum.
The study suggests it does not exist equally in all areas and is stronger in Women's Studies and Sociology than most other academic areas.
Statistical averages are in no way random or not typically meaningless. They don't reveal all information, but they usually reveal some meaningful information.
Why is the most prevalent opinion more significant than other accepted opinion?
Usually the truth, if it is new enough, is the minority opinion. It takes time for new truths to gain majority status.
The minority opinion among Women's Studies academics is similar to the opinion of of academics that do not study Gender and to members of the lay public. If the truth lies in that minority opinion, then it shows that people whose profession is supposed to be to understand gender are more ignorant about the truth regarding gender than the lay public. The fact that the majority view among that group regarding human universals is out of step with the most up to date science suggests that is in fact the case with the majority of academics in those fields. That is a rather damning fact about the scientific illegitimacy of that field, suggesting it is promoting nonsense more than knowledge and should be done away with.
The most common opinion is usually the product of personality and desires and common conceptions, not careful thought.
The degree to which that is true directly to whether the group in question is comprised of people with intellectual integrity willing and able to defer to empirical and rational principles. Thus, it is infinitely more true of the common opinions withing religious groups than scientific groups, and more true of the general public than any valid academic discipline.
But whether the majority or minority opinion is the result of more honest careful thought is not merely up for grabs, but a matter of which opinion is more logically coherent with the available empirical data. At least as far as human universals that data overwhelming favors the influence of basic biology than socialization. Thus, the OP study suggests that the majority opinion among academics in women's studies and Sociology is more biases and less the results of "careful thought" than not only other academics in general, but also the general lay population.
....bell curve where the average is nearly identical to the median and mode. Thus, the average tells us that most people in the sample hover around that value and that 50% of the sample is above that value....
This is about opinion.
There is no up and down with opinion.
There absolutely is variability with opinion. They measured opinions on scale that varied from a possible resulting value for each person of 0 to 50, with people ranging across the scale. Not only were the individual items within each type of scale reliably correlated with each other but the total value on each type of scale was correlated with the values on the other types. This shows that variation "up and down" was meaningful and not random and arbitrary (which would produce no correlation).
It is a meaningless forced opinion.
It was not a forced opinion. People choose the relative importance they thought that biology and socialization had in created currently observable gender differences. They could assign all importance to one or the other, or varying relative combinations. There is nothing artificial about it. It reflects real opinions real people have about these questions and even maps on quite well to the types and range of opinions about gender differences we see expressed on this board. The authentic validity of their measure of these opinions is The fact that the "up and down" variation in opinions were strongly correlated with political ideology in the manner consistent with any rationally based prediction due how liberals and conservatives express such opinions in every other way, whether in discourse, actions, or policies.
Opinion is far richer than these forced either/or scenarios.
Ah, the ol' 'rainbows are too magical to be understood with science trope of the snake-oil ideologue. Yeah, that anti-science dogma has shown through in many of your comments.
What has meaning is the facts.
And the OP study presents meaningful facts that you blindly reject.
And in terms of genes vs experience they are far more interconnected than simply either/or.
The study does not presume either or and does not force people to take and either or position.
For the visual system to develop properly the eyes have to receive stimulation at a certain point of development.
And yet it is extremely implausible that genetic variation and variation in the external stimuli are equally responsible for variation between adults in every dimension of the visual system. The relative causal contribution of variance in genes and environment to the variance in a trait will itself vary from trait to trait.
No matter the complex interaction of genes and environment, variation in an trait (whether within or between groups) can be due more to varying genes or varying environments, and people can and do have opinions about what that relative importance is, which is what the study assessed.
