Article archive / November 1, 2012
Originally published: . Volume 4, No. 3. Source pages: 2.
The September issue of Perspectives in Psychological Science contains a special section on a study by Yoel Inbar & Joris Lammers, who found that psychology is predominately liberal. Only six percent described themselves as conservative “overall.” The report was picked up by the media which emphasized the juicy news that psychologists discriminate against their conservative colleagues, and those colleagues are hiding in the closet.
In itself this was interesting. Intolerant psychologists? Seems like it should be an oxymoron.
But the real meat and potatoes was in the five commentaries. “No one knows,” Philip Tetlock of U. of Pennsylvania, wrote, “how many research programs social psychologists have failed to launch, or how many research discoveries they have failed to make, as a result of the skew in the distribution of views within their discipline.”
Princeton’s Deborah Prentice said the findings do not speak well for the “… health of the field, …” because of the “ideological narrowness produced by liberal norms.”
Psychology’s liberal worldview is certainly an honorable one: concern for the well-being and dignity of all people, compassion for those in need, openness, tolerance, appreciation of intellectual pursuits. But at 94 percent, can we prove we aren’t neck deep in groupthink?
Groupthink. The warm, comforting molasses of friends who feel and think exactly the way we do, who support us and never criticize. To know we’ll be always validated, that we and our best friends are on the right side of things. That all is well in Mudville. That our daddy’s rich and our mama’s good looking.
When extreme (Jim Jones and the Temple of Doom) groupthink looks pretty bizarre from the outside. But in softer tones it’s harder to recognize, fueled by all the regular flaws of human judgment: the tendency to seek only information that confirms our views; to find shortcuts for solving problems; to save time and even ride along on the coattails of someone else’s effort. Psychologists aren’t immune to the same group phenomena that plagues everyone else. The polarization that helps fuel groupthink, or at least some degree of flawed decision-making, freezes our brains just the same. We slide with the rest of society into it, or at least stand knee deep in it as a matter of course.
Pew Research tells us that the partisan differences have reached a 25-year high with strongest differences about the role of government, the environment, and in religion and social conservatism.
The riff is reflected in opinions about who to trust for information. News organizations’ scores on “believability” are at a low, also split along party lines and which outlets are trusted and which aren’t.
Groupthink, while mostly unconscious to us (although I can usually feel my mind turning into pea soup about a half hour into a committee meeting) we know it best from the signs and symptoms. Closing off and guarding information flow, over-confidence in the “morality” of our position, distorted interpretation of facts, or poor problem-solving.
Could undiagnosed groupthink account for problems that appear to have no straightforward answer? “The amount of fundamental discovery is staggering, and medical journals are choked with spectacular science,” writes Julio Licinio, MD, editor of Molecular Psychiatry. “Paradoxically, research advances have not led to new cures,” he writes in his 2011 editorial. Research doesn’t lead to cures? Imagine that.
The Perspectives review spells it out for us. We are missing big chunks.
Tetlock points out that conservatism in not a one-dimensional construct. “Conservatism is a complex coalitional construction in contemporary political science, a loose alliance of moral traditionalists, economic libertarians and national-security hawks who, in American politics, come together periodically to compete, more or less effectively, in two-party, winner-takes-all presidential elections.
Perhaps we need an affirmative action plan to include these three groups. Then we could avoid the deeper problem that Tetlock points to, “… whether social psychology has an adequate critical mass of traditional conservative, economic libertarian, national-security hawk research talent to correct the potential research excesses of a largely liberal left-leaning field.”
We have to wonder if our own “sociopolitical groupthink,” writes Richard Redding, is harming our scientific efforts to help our society. Are we too close to government to critique it?
In our own backyard we have a scientist-practitioner whose work is challenging the policies and practices of the behemoth SSA. Like a good psychologist, Mike Chafetz began to look more carefully at what he was doing. Combining his knowledge from forensic psychology, he started following the breadcrumbs, on his own dime, to uncover what might turn out to be waste in government running into the billions. After reviewing his work, one might ask, “What took us so long?”
The military suicide rate is another concern. Our returning servicemen and servicewomen say we don’t get it. “The public does not understand the problems faced by those in the military or their families,” 84 percent of the veterans say.
I’m beginning to believe that the decisions in the Benghazi tragedy may have been groupthink. To remove the bulk of the security forces from the Ambassador, until only a few men were left to deal with the terrorist threats to the consulate, makes no sense. It doesn’t take a hawk to see that.
I don’t know if Ty Woods, the former Navy SEAL who disobeyed orders so he could give assistance to others, and lost his life in the firefight, was a conservative or not. I don’t know if he was a moral traditionalist or not, or a national security hawk or not.
What I do know is here was a man of courage and good conscience, who disobeyed orders so to aid others at ultimate sacrifice to himself.
And I know the meaning his actions give to our words–land of the free and home of the brave–is crystal clear.
This article is part of a historical newspaper archive. Read the original issue for its original layout, photographs and graphics.