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S10 E3: Lee Jussim: Surviving cancel culture while keeping your head
20 Plays5 months ago
Lee Jussim is Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Rutgers University, and a founding member of both the Academic Freedom Alliance and the Society for Open Inquiry in the Behavioral Sciences. In addition to being a renowned psychology researcher, Dr. Jussim is also an outspoken critic of cancel culture and the politicization of his discipline of social psychology, and of academia writ large. For his efforts, he has been the target of cancelation attempts. We discuss his upbringing, his research on stereotypes and other controversial topics, his brushes with cancel culture, the risks of becoming reactionary when facing cancelation attempts, and his tips for maintaining integrity and principles in the face of these pressures.
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Transcript
Introduction to Free Mind Podcast
00:00:09
Speaker
Welcome back to the Free Mind podcast, where we explore topics in Western history, politics, philosophy, literature, and current events with a laser focus on seeking the truth and an adventurous disregard for ideological and academic fashions. I'm
Meet Dr. Lee Justin
00:00:26
Speaker
Matt Burgess. My guest today is Lee Justin,
00:00:30
Speaker
Lee Justin is distinguished professor of psychology at Rutgers University and a founding member of both the Academic Freedom Alliance and the Society for Open Inquiry in the Behavioral Sciences. In addition to being a renowned psychology researcher, Dr. Justin is also an outspoken critic of cancel culture and the politicization of his discipline of social psychology and of academia writ large.
Cancel Culture and Integrity
00:00:55
Speaker
For his efforts, he has been the target of cancellation attempts
00:00:59
Speaker
We discuss his career path, his research on stereotypes and other controversial topics, his brushes with cancel culture, the risks of becoming reactionary when facing cancellation attempts, and his tips for maintaining integrity and principles in the face of these pressures. Lee Justin, welcome to the Free Mind podcast. Well, thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.
00:01:23
Speaker
As we'll talk about over the next hour or so, you have an interesting relationship with cancel culture, both as somebody who I would say has conquered it without being conquered by it and being consumed by it or changed ideologically and scientifically by it.
00:01:46
Speaker
So we'll talk about that.
Dr. Justin's Academic Journey
00:01:48
Speaker
But first, I want to ask you about your background, because my recollection from reading about it is that you have an interesting background and upbringing and path to academia, particularly in comparison to what some of your critics might otherwise wrongly assume about you. So tell me about that. How did you get to be where you are?
00:02:10
Speaker
Well, let's see, how do I keep this short? I hated school and was on a quest to undermine my high school as much as possible, which got me in and out of trouble throughout all of high school. And I went to college and hated that also, dropped out, went back, dropped out, dropped out like three times ultimately, eventually got my degree. And when I went back the final time,
00:02:39
Speaker
The idea of having a job that you just love doing was not in my background. You grew up in a Brooklyn public housing project and jobs were things you got to make money and survive. The idea of having a satisfying career was not on my radar. Maybe there were some
00:03:05
Speaker
Some of the kids had that, but not in most of my circles. So when I finally went back to college...
00:03:12
Speaker
It was like, given that doing something because you love to do it was off the table, well, what should you do? You should try and find a field we can make boatloads of money in. Why not make boatloads of money if there's no option for actually enjoying work? I actually started out, when I finally returned, I was going to major in something like economics or business or something like that.
00:03:39
Speaker
Because I'd been out of school for a while, I only signed up for three courses. I figured, let's make it not too hard and I'll get used to it. I'll put my toe in the collegiate water and see how things go. So I did that, but then having been
00:03:56
Speaker
in and out of colleges before, I realized that the bureaucracy is fundamentally evil and functions as if it's evil and that the university bureaucracies will do all sorts of things to ruin your life if they can. So given that that was the case, I anticipated the possibility that even though I believed I had registered for three courses, they were going to kick me after the semester started, they were going to kick me out of two of them.
00:04:25
Speaker
You know, it was fully enrolled, and I didn't realize it, and I was low on the totem pole because I was a new student. There were a million reasons the bureaucracy can have for doing that. This is infamous at Rutgers.
00:04:41
Speaker
where students get deregistered all the time. So they register and then they get kicked out. So this is not some delusion on my part. So I figured, okay, I don't want to ruin my entire semester. So assuming I get rid of, I get kicked out of two courses, I probably should register for five and then I can just drop two.
00:05:01
Speaker
So in thinking about that, I'm like, okay, what did I despise least when I went to school the first time? And that was psychology. So I did not like psychology. I hated it. I just hated it less than I hated everything else. So I registered for two psych courses.
00:05:18
Speaker
So I started going to these five courses. And within two weeks, I loved both psych courses. Like, I just loved both courses. And neither were taught by particularly charismatic professors. So it wasn't like they were some sort of, one was like so dry. He was like, he probably would put most of the rest of the students to sleep, but I love the material. The other guy was not that dry, but he was a good teacher. He wasn't anything amazing. And, you know, one was a course on learning and memory. The other was a course on social psychology.
00:05:47
Speaker
And I love both of them. Had the learning and memory guy made an announcement in his class, I'm working on all these research projects. Our graduates are invited to help. I'd love to have you help me. I would have signed up for that. But he didn't. The social psychologists did. I signed up to work with this guy. And by the end of the semester, I loved it. I just loved everything about it. And at the end of that very first semester,
00:06:13
Speaker
having spent most of the semester doing research with this guy, he and actually the learning and memory guy were sort of like, I had advice, it was a small school. So they both sort of functioned as my advisors. And I went up into his office, which you could do easily. And I said, okay, what do I have to do to become a social psychologist? And he laid it out and the rest is history. So that is my background. That's great.
00:06:41
Speaker
And so tell me a little bit about your career and what you've researched and how you got interested
Research on Stereotypes and Biases
00:06:48
Speaker
in it. Because I imagine there's a lot of people who know your newer stuff, but maybe even know some of your older stuff on stereotype accuracy, which we'll talk about. What were your original research topics and how would you define your major interests and how they came about?
00:07:06
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, originally I had really two main interests, which were really how stereotypes bias person perception. So person perception is judgments of a particular individual. It's not like general beliefs. So how would my beliefs about your demographic statuses influence or bias or distort my judgments about you? That would be stereotypes and person perception. And then the other was on self-fulfilling prophecies, especially self-fulfilling prophecies in educational, in K to 12 type contexts, self-fulfilling prophecies. Can you give an example for an early audience?
00:07:37
Speaker
of self-fulfilling prophecy or stereotype bias? Sure. Let's say I'm a teacher, you're a six-grade student in my class. How this came to be is beyond the scope of what I was doing, but for some reason, I hold an inordinately high expectation for you. The self-fulfilling prophecy hypothesis would be that you would do even better
00:08:01
Speaker
in the class with me, then you would otherwise have done because my expectations would lead me to treat you particularly favorably, give you opportunities that maybe I don't give other students, be more forgiving of your errors, and ultimately you actually do better in the class. Of course, the flip side is if I had a negative expectation for you, it would undermine your achievement. So that's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Okay. And so you got interested in that and you researched it, and what were some of your main findings?
00:08:31
Speaker
Okay, well, so that was my ass backwards entrained to accuracy, which and accuracy was my ass backwards discovery of the sort of extent of political moral agendas driving much social science research. It was all ass backwards. So I would do the studies of stereotypes and person perception and
00:09:01
Speaker
We found bias in many of those studies, but the biases tended to be small, small effect sizes.
00:09:12
Speaker
biases of the sort that people might expect. So biases against women, biases against minorities in certain settings, things like that. Yes, that's right. Exactly. That's right. Exactly. We did race, we did sex, we actually did sexuality, sexual orientation. We did a slew of these things. And what contexts? Well, and so sometimes we would do these as experimental lab studies. So actually my job talk,
00:09:38
Speaker
involved people evaluating black and white job applicants who via their peers, so they saw actually slides.
00:09:50
Speaker
This was 1980s, so it was low tech. They saw slides and heard video recordings of black and white job applicants who dressed as if they were sort of affluent middle class or kind of working class. They were an appropriate jack and tie, but it would be like this sort of cheap jacket, this kind of weird wide tie. That was the law.
00:10:14
Speaker
The affluent ones looked, you know, kind of business sharp and stuff and also they spoke in standard or non-standard speech styles, so There's standard English. This was my advisor at the time had expertise in sociolinguistics as the sort of study of language and perception of language and how people use it so the
00:10:38
Speaker
The term was network English. So in the 1980s, the network news anchors spoke without any discernible accent. They just, you know, just spoke in this sort of straightforward.
00:10:49
Speaker
kind of style, whereas in the non-standard dials we created, in order to make it credible for both black and white job applicants, we created this non-standard style that was sort of a mix of Brooklynese and black English.
00:11:11
Speaker
Okay. And is the thing you're trying to test basically tease apart class bias, culture bias from just strict racial bias? Yeah, exactly. That's right. So how much is the straight race bias versus to what extent do people assume that white people are richer than black people? Well, then if you can control for the appearance of affluence, well, then you can get at
00:11:38
Speaker
race bias more purely, but also see to what extent is there social class bias. So anyway, so that would be one. We also did it in classrooms, through the teacher expectations stuff.
00:11:51
Speaker
You could, you know, we had these very rich data sets with students prior standardized test scores and their grades and their future standardized test scores and grades. And you could, we did test the extent to which teachers beliefs about students, the perceptions of students were influenced by their records versus their demographics. And what'd you find? Well, okay.
00:12:19
Speaker
We consistently found very small bias effects. Bias effects regression, standardized regression coefficient is about 0.1, 0.15. Along which axes? Both. It was...
00:12:36
Speaker
Both. It was mostly both. It wasn't every analysis, but you got the biases you would expect for race and sex. But the main predictor of teacher expectations, there was like seven, eight times as large, was the kid's actual achievement. So it's not like there was no bias. There was bias. But the bias was tiny in comparison to the extent to which teachers were in touch with reality.
00:13:04
Speaker
So we sort of got the same thing with the experimental job applicant studies, where when you controlled for, as we did, speech style and social class, there was actually what we found was a slight tendency to favor the black applicants. So when the black applicants were just as upper class and spoke just as standard as white applicants, people favored them over the white applicants. Again, the effect was small, but it was there.
00:13:34
Speaker
Okay, so one of these are the first quasi-accuracy findings. Judging people on their merits, or on their personal characteristics,
00:13:48
Speaker
You can have an almost philosophical discussion as whether that's accuracy or not, but it's kind of accuracy-like. So sort of doing that with teacher expectations. To what extent are teacher expectations self-fulfilling? To what extent do my expectations for you cause your achievement versus to what extent if I have a high expectation or a low expectation for you, to what extent is that accurate?
00:14:09
Speaker
And what is accuracy? Accuracy is predictive validity without causal influence. So if I say it's gonna rain later today and it rains, I was right. I didn't cause it to rain. Now, just because we're dealing with something social, the principle holds. If I say Matt is gonna win his next tennis match, and I'm not playing the match, you're playing against somebody else, and you win the match. You're certainly gonna be wrong about that, but go ahead.
00:14:34
Speaker
Okay, right. So maybe I'd be wrong about that, right? So that would be incorrect. But if you did win the match, then I would simply be right. Now, I could be your coach. If I'm your coach and I work with you and I train you and you win the match, well then I might have helped cause you to win the match. But here, thousands of miles away, I'm not causing you to win the match. I'm simply correct.
00:14:54
Speaker
Same thing with teachers and students. Teachers' expectations may predict student achievement, but it's like an empirical question. How much of that is because they're self-fulfilling versus because they actually know which kids are smart and which ones aren't? And how do you figure out if they're self-fulfilling or not? Basic regression equations, right? You have teacher expectations early in the year predicting student achievement at the end of the year.
00:15:18
Speaker
Right? Now that's just a simple correlation. Okay, so the question is, what explains that correlation? So if you use prior achievement as a predictor of both teacher expectations and students' feature achievement, the relationship between teachers is going to drop dramatically, right? And if you think of it as like a three variable model, I don't know how much your listeners are going to know something like path analysis, but if you have
00:15:50
Speaker
Past achievement- Probably most of them not, but- Okay, your past achievement is the basis for teacher expectations. Past achievement is a basis for future achievement, right? I mean, a kid who's done well, you know, all throughout school is probably gonna do well. This year, teachers probably pick up on that. So if a teacher predicts a kid who's been doing really well is gonna continue to do really well, they're probably right. So using regression, you can kind of tease all that out. Gotcha. Okay, and what was the answer?
00:16:18
Speaker
The answer was sort of much like the stereotype stuff. Teacher expectations were consistently self-fulfilling, but the effects were small. About, you cross multiple studies, about two thirds or more of the relationship between teacher expectations and student achievement was accuracy. They just knew which kids were smarter and which ones weren't. But there was some self-fulfilling effect in all of the studies that we did, so. And so that, how does that bring you to accuracy and what is accuracy?
00:16:47
Speaker
Yeah, accuracy is predictive validity without causal influence. That's what I would call accuracy. So if you just predict an outcome and it comes true and you didn't cause it to come true, then you were simply right. If I predict the stock market's going to go up, even I'm one person and I'm not like a bond wizard or something like that.
00:17:06
Speaker
some guy who can move markets. If I buy 100 shares of some stock, it's not really gonna change the stock market. But if I predict the market's gonna go up and it goes up, then I'm simply right. I'm not causing it to go up. So there's just a million things like that. So that's how I began to sort of stumble onto accuracy. And it became clear very early that many in my field
00:17:32
Speaker
did not like the idea that person perception judgments were based primarily on individuating information, that is the personal characteristics of the person being judged, rather than stereotypes. So if I'm judging you mainly on
00:17:52
Speaker
It depends on the context of education or work, on your competence, your accomplishments, not your race or sex or anything
Politics and Psychology: An Intersection
00:17:59
Speaker
else. Although there is a little bit of that, mostly it's judging you on your merits. Okay, so they didn't like that. And then, of course, the self-fulm prophecy, once upon a time, 60s, 70s, 80s,
00:18:11
Speaker
was, much like implicit bias in microaggressions are now, a major tool for social justice-like thinking and efforts in the social sciences. So teachers are this instrument of racism and sexism because their expectations are self-fulfilling and all this sort of stuff. And the idea that, well, actually, they're mostly accurate cuts against that grain. So that's how I stumbled into the political sensitivities
00:18:41
Speaker
of the field, but then it gets better. So as I just laid out, I started out studying stereotype biases. This is what social psychologists have been doing this since like the 1920s and 1930s. Sure, major topic. I was a grad student. I'm trained in the field. I'm just doing whatever, you know, I'm doing what a good social psychologist, trying to be a good social psychologist, doing what people do to study stereotype biases. Okay. But then I stumble on this accuracy stuff and
00:19:10
Speaker
I start reviewing literature first for just individual articles, then for review type papers. And there are all these claims in the literature through like the 80s and 90s that stereotypes are inaccurate. And you still see this, you know, you'll see this. The national funding agencies will denounce doing anything based on stereotypes and all this sort of stuff, which is fine.
00:19:40
Speaker
Sort of fine and now we're talking about groups because before you were talking what individuals That's right, so I'm going into the literature there's all these claims Testaments to the inaccuracy of stereotypes And
00:19:59
Speaker
I'm trying to be reasonably scholarly, so I try to get down to the original data supporting the claims that stereotypes are inaccurate. So where is this wealth of data showing that stereotypes are inaccurate? And just to be clear about what we're talking about, when you say stereotypes are inaccurate or they're accurate, we're talking about basically
00:20:24
Speaker
claims about group means or something, right? We're not talking about like extending group-based claims to individuals. Yeah. Yes. Yes. We're talking about stereotypes as perceptions of groups. Yes, absolutely. But exactly what we're talking about is sort of hard to pin down because in reviewing and doing just sort of hardcore scholarly scientific reviews of the literature, what I stumbled upon
00:20:53
Speaker
is that there was almost no there there. And what I mean by that is an article would make some claim to the effect of stereotypes being inaccurate, and then it branched. In one branch, the claim would appear without a reference. So they're just making the claim. And that means there is no reference. There's no original source for me to track down that provided evidence for that claim.
00:21:23
Speaker
There's no source because they didn't cite anything. So that's branch one. Branch two was they did cite something. So I would go to what they said. It's like, okay, you know, when I first started doing this, okay, now I'm going to get to the bottom of this. I'm going to find out why my field is constantly declaring stereotypes inaccurate. I'm going to get to the original data and I would get to, I would get to that paper. That paper would also declare stereotypes to be inaccurate and it would have no data. So circular referencing, basically.
00:21:53
Speaker
It was circular reference. It was my first discovery of idea laundering. And so there was really very little, there were pervasive claims. The literature was filled with the presumption, sort of like the sky is blue. You wouldn't really need a reference to declare the sky to be blue. That's what stereotypes are inaccurate was. It was like saying the sky was blue, but there was no evidence underlying it. So then around that time, Clark McCauley,
00:22:23
Speaker
who has since retired, I think, started doing empirical research on the accuracy of stereotypes. And he would do this by asking people, he mostly did racial stereotypes, as I read, did race and sex, and he would ask peoples for their beliefs
00:22:43
Speaker
that mapped onto census data. So you go into the census data to find out what proportion of blacks and whites have high school diplomas, are on welfare, have been convicted of a crime, have been a victim of a crime. I mean, you can find out zillions of things in just the census data about all sorts of group differences. So he did that, and they just asked people to estimate the black and white levels of getting a high school degree and being on welfare and committing a crime, being victim of a crime, here's a slew of things.
00:23:13
Speaker
And lo and behold, what he finds, and these are small scale studies, you don't make too much of them, but lo and behold, what he finds is people are stunningly accurate. The correlations between people's beliefs and the census data are like 0.8, 0.9, consistently. With a slope of one or no? Meaning are they correlated, but are they also getting the magnitude of the differences right?
00:23:39
Speaker
So that's a very interesting question. There were a slew of those early studies, especially on race and sex. Janet Swim was another social psychologist who actually did this. There was more evidence, so one of the common claims in the stereotype literature, which goes back to Gordon-Allport and Henri Tajval, that stereotypes lead to exaggerations of group differences.
00:24:09
Speaker
that claim is also all over the literature. What McCauley and Swim were finding in these early studies, 80s and 90s, of race and sex stereotypes was that there was sometimes evidence of exaggeration. People perceived more of a difference than there really was, but there was actually more evidence of people underestimating the differences than overestimating them.
00:24:33
Speaker
So there was certainly no clear pattern of exaggeration. I mean, that was really falsified by that early research, which isn't to say people never exaggerate real differences, but that early evidence was completely inconsistent with the claim that an inherent feature of stereotypes is they lead people to exaggerate real differences. Okay, so would the following be an accurate lay summary of what we understand about these things?
00:25:03
Speaker
And that is the following. Basically, people are intuitive Bayseans. So they form prior expectations based on information either about salient groups that somebody belongs to, if they don't know them, or about past performance, if they do know them. They form those prior reliefs.
00:25:26
Speaker
those prior beliefs can cause small biases in how they treat people, basically anticipating treatment is a different issue than judgment. So these are not studies of discrimination. Well, you were talking about, you were talking about, I thought at the beginning you were talking about studies hiring discrimination.
00:25:48
Speaker
And then self-affilling prophecies, we don't necessarily know what the treatment is, but there even further is one based on the fact that we're finding a non-zero effect, right? Yeah, that's true. And there's lots of, you know, if you take it out of the politically salient context of race and gender, you know, in white collar professions, say, I would say there's
00:26:10
Speaker
pretty compelling anecdotal examples of this type of thing. So, you know, one that I can think of being a big basketball fan is Jeremy Lin, who is, you know, consistently underestimated by coaches and scouts compared to his statistics, plausibly, partly because he was Asian American, which is a very underrepresented group in the NBA. And then, you know, when he was given a chance, he would outperform coaches' expectations kind of for the same reason.
00:26:38
Speaker
But on the other hand, you know, he still made the NBA and I, you know, I don't, I don't know endurance being now to the, the, the idea that these effects are, are ultimately small. You know, I haven't seen
00:26:47
Speaker
a study of this, but I would imagine in sports where you can measure performance really well, it's not probably that common that somebody, you know, goes completely unnoticed despite consistently outperforming their expectations, especially in the age of Moneyball. So, you know, who would have thought that Moneyball was the solution to racism in the NBA, but, you know, maybe it is. Right, although when they first developed Moneyball, they exploited the fact that some players were over and underestimated.
00:27:16
Speaker
That was the entire mechanism.
00:27:19
Speaker
But that was mostly individual. It was not so much demographic as far as I know. Well, but some of the, we don't know why, you know, various people that were underestimated by the Scouts were underestimated, right? I don't know anything about baseball and like basketball, right? So there may be some cases where there was some demographic thing or something else, like wasn't one of the pitchers for the Oakland A's in the story. He threw funny. And so people underestimated him for that. Yeah, right. That's right. Exactly. That's right.
00:27:49
Speaker
So let me link this now to another academic bugbear of yours, which is implicit bias in the IAT.
Critique of Implicit Bias Theories
00:27:59
Speaker
You know, a naive, uninitiated person to this debate might say, okay, it sounds like you're describing people sometimes making small, but still occasionally consequential, inaccurate judgments about individuals based on priors using their fast brain. That kind of sounds like unconscious bias, doesn't it? And so if not, why not? And if so, then what's the problem with the implicit bias?
00:28:28
Speaker
framework beyond just the test, the IAT, which you can talk about if you want, doesn't measure it very well. Yeah. Well, so the core problem is that, I don't know, some huge proportion of the claims about implicit bias are based on the IAT.
00:28:47
Speaker
That is the core problem. People are subject to all sorts of biases. Kahneman won the Nobel Prize for identifying a slew of errors and biases and heuristics that people use presumably without being aware that that's what they're doing.
00:29:10
Speaker
Right? That these are logical errors. People don't purposely make logical errors. So in that sense, you could say, well, that's implicit bias. But implicit bias doesn't mean the availability heuristic. So if it was the availability heuristic is that when people are asked to think about some sort of how often something happens, their answer is like what comes to mind easily, not some sort of
00:29:39
Speaker
ultimate assessment of the frequency of the event, which they're not really capable of doing. Just to put a fine point on it, the IAT, which is the Implicit Association Test, basically measures how quickly you associate, say, science with different demographic groups, but then incorrectly people interpret the results as saying you would be biased against those groups, which often people find that you're not. Is that basically the issue?
00:30:06
Speaker
The outcome is a reaction time. It's just how quickly people do the test. That's not a bias in any universe. It's just a reaction time.
00:30:23
Speaker
that the test has been called a measure of implicit bias is delusional. It's completely delusional. Now, it is an empirical question whether those reaction time differences predict or correspond to other kinds of biases, and that evidence is really all over the map. Okay. And isn't it the case that at least two of the three inventors of the IAT agree with what you just said?
00:30:50
Speaker
Not that it really matters, but. There has been a very slow grudging retreat from some of the claims, some of the more melodramatic claims common in the 90s and early 2000s.
00:31:12
Speaker
but not many. And I think what I see is a willingness to retreat only when overwhelmingly compelled to do so.
00:31:31
Speaker
partially as a, like a retreating vanguard move to protect the core ideas and core claims. So there's a recent special issue of Datalist. This is, which, which, yeah, I know Datalist. National Academies of Science and on implicit bias. It's mostly by advocates. If you read that, there's very little acknowledgement. There's a little, little hints
00:32:00
Speaker
here and there, there's not much in the way of acknowledgment of the many limitations and failures of work based especially on the IAT. Let me just ask one more question and then I want to move on. Just to put a fine point on it for the average person who goes to an HR training, but has a skeptical mind and maybe also reads your and some other people's stuff criticizing the IAT.
00:32:29
Speaker
would the following be an accurate statement? If I was talking to such a person, you know, going to an HR training, I would say, you know, if somebody says to you that take an IAT and it'll tell you how racist you are, that's BS. But on the other hand, there is evidence that people do sometimes misapply group-based perceptions to individuals.
00:32:57
Speaker
with small effect, but measurable effect. And that's probably associated with your fast brain. And therefore, if you slow down in your deliberations, and if you focus on more data-driven empirical measures for selecting, say, job candidates, that those are good ways to minimize unconscious bias that might make you make worse hiring decisions
00:33:27
Speaker
also in biased ways. How am I doing? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yes, no, I think that's absolutely right. That we're all subject to all sorts of biases. You never want to underestimate that. But the fix is fairly straightforward. And at least if you're in, right, again, remember, this is my unconscious body. I mean, there are going to be some people who hold antipathies
00:33:50
Speaker
Blamed explicit into these. This is not gonna solve anything among those people. So if you hate people from Butan, me urging you to judge people on their merits is like, I don't really give a damn because I don't want anybody from Butan working in my company. So it's not gonna solve that problem. But if you're a reasonable, decent person who wants to hire the best person or admit the best student,
00:34:18
Speaker
and you're cognizant of some potential to judge people in a biased manner, the solution is really simple. Exactly as you were saying, to slow down, really evaluate, figure out what are your standards here? What are you looking for? Whether it's a job or graduate admissions or undergraduate admissions or really anything else, what are you looking for? What are the criteria that a person could demonstrate that would show that their
00:34:43
Speaker
appropriate or a strong candidate for the job and focus on whether at the extent to which they exhibit those criteria. That's the issue. That's what you want to know.
Diversity Training and Gender Issues
00:34:53
Speaker
One more little question that's kind of related that just came up, but I think is potentially important. Related to your Bhutan example, sort of. Because some people talk about the way these trainings can backfire. And one of the ways I think they can backfire is making
00:35:11
Speaker
differences more salient than they otherwise would, and therefore triggering people's us versus them psychology more than they otherwise would. How strong is the evidence for backfire in that respect? Then the second way I think backfire, I can imagine maybe arising, is with self-fulfilling prophecies.
00:35:30
Speaker
People say they're self-filling prophecies if you get the impression that your teacher doesn't think highly of you. What if the New York Times or your teacher is telling you every day that you'll never succeed on account of your demographics and the systems that are stacked against you? So what's the... Yeah, the evidence is... How much evidence is there on that? There's not a lot of speculation on that. There is pretty good evidence that mandatory
00:36:00
Speaker
basically coercive diversity type trainings are ineffective. But it's not really clear why. Gotcha. So are there backlash effects? I mean, it might be, it could be that just being required to do it is a pain in the ass. It's like, just let me do my damn job. And it's not exactly increasing
00:36:23
Speaker
racial or other inner group resentments, it's just increasing resentment for having to endure this ridiculous training, right? I suspect that that's some of what's going on with the trainings. On the sort of steady diet of the media saying, you know, the society is like hopelessly hierarchical and you and your group have no hope whatsoever, that's a very big
00:36:51
Speaker
claim, it's very hard to get really good data. But my, I mean, I believe I can't, I can't identify a source at this point. But I'm pretty sure there's survey data showing that younger people believe that, you know, are more likely to believe things like the system is rigged, and you know, you can't get ahead and all this sort of stuff. So, but I don't know what, do they believe that any more than they did 50 years ago? I don't really know.
00:37:21
Speaker
Well, and does it affect their performance and their choices? Yeah. The anecdote that always makes me think of this is a young woman I know who, I guess it's a few years ago now, but when she was in high school, she went to an all-girls school. She was the head of the robotics club, really into STEM, really excelled at it. And then this is in Toronto.
00:37:46
Speaker
She got invited to go to a women in STEM day. And this was right after a Canadian woman had won the Nobel Prize in physics, which was a big deal Donna Strickland. And so she went to this is and this is shortly before this, this this person I know was was applying to college.
00:38:03
Speaker
And so she went to this women in STEM day thing that was gonna be about, we just won the Nobel Prize in physics and here are all the cool things women do in STEM. And of course what it actually was was speaker after speaker saying, this is how horrible it is going to be for you if you go into STEM as a woman. And of course, this person I know did not end up majoring in STEM. And I always think of that like, gosh, that's such a tragic case of backfire. Anyway, I wanna move on though and talk about your relationship with cancel culture.
00:38:33
Speaker
I want to do an epilogue on this because this amazing paper that came out that sort of touches on, that sort of will wrap a lot of this up into a nice neat bow. So first, let me do an entree with direct personal experience. During my last term as site chair, intermittently, I would have female faculty come up to me
00:39:00
Speaker
Usually as a plea in some sort of bargaining thing to try and get a raise how female faculty are underpaid Right and everybody knows this. This is like, you know, there's this bias throughout the system better now so in my last year when there was much they could do about it I did an analysis of I had access to everybody's salary data and
00:39:27
Speaker
at the assistant level, assistant professor level, men and women were paid almost identically. At every other level, at associate professor, full professor, and then the highest level at Rutgers is distinguished, some people have named chairs, but fold them all into distinguished professor, women were paid more than men. And it was often pretty substantial. So that was actually a very interesting experience because
00:39:53
Speaker
It didn't stop the lobbying for higher pay, but it did eliminate the rhetoric around women being underpaid. So that's a personal experience. Yeah, we had a pretty interesting thing here with that. So our state passed, Colorado passed an Equal Pay for Equal Work Act and said basically fix your equal pay or else.
00:40:18
Speaker
So our university addressed this by fitting basically a regression, but that didn't include gender as a variable. So they didn't actually test to see if there was a disparity. And what they did was they said, you know, if you're below the line and you're female, we'll give you a race.
00:40:44
Speaker
So in kind of a hilarious way, they opened themselves up to lawsuits from both sides because they have, you know, there are literal cases in some departments of, you know, some departments that have standard pay scales for new assistant professors where there's no negotiating, this is just what you get. And so now there's some cases where you've got a male and a female hired at the same time, at the same salary,
00:41:12
Speaker
and performed similarly and now the females paid more, and the university has told her it's because you're female. So there's the open up to lawsuits from males in that case. But then there's also exposure to lawsuits from females because they've sent basically letters to a bunch of women who are seniors saying, we think you're underpaid because of your gender and here's how much we think it is. And of course, some of them are saying, well, we want back pay.
00:41:40
Speaker
And so it's it's like and everyone I asked an administrator once why they didn't include gender to in their Regression that was supposedly measuring gender disparities. They said well, we're not economists Okay. Yeah, you've got a whole department full of them, you know This is the kicker so
00:42:03
Speaker
A paper came out within the last year that examined audit studies of sex based job discrimination. So an audit study is an experimental study in which the researchers send job application materials to real jobs.
00:42:31
Speaker
It's an experiment because they vary the demographics. It's common to do this with white names. These studies were with male and female names. They're fake applicants. What's great about this, if you do it with a fake applicant, you can make sure that Bob and Barbara have an identical resume.
00:42:55
Speaker
This was a meta-analysis of 45 years of such studies. There was scores of such studies. Oh, this came out recently. I saw this, but yeah, go ahead. Yes, right. Okay. So the main finding was no overall evidence of sex discrimination over the 40 years. There was non-significant tendency for men to be favored.
00:43:19
Speaker
before around 2005, 2009, something like that. After that, it flipped. There's another slight tendency to favor women after that, but all of these effects were really tiny, and if I remember correctly, not even just significant. That's not even the most interesting thing.
00:43:38
Speaker
I mean, that was the core thing of the study. That is very interesting. And just to be clear, my recollection of the study was that they found small bias against men in female-dominated fields throughout the time, and then small bias against women in male-dominated fields, which flipped in around 2009, 2010 to being pro-female bias. Yeah, that's right. That's exactly what they found. My favorite finding from the paper, though,
00:44:04
Speaker
is not the gender discrimination, because that is what it is, and it turned out that there's not much over there there. They asked laypeople and two types of academics to predict what their meta-analysis would find. And they were way off positively, right?
00:44:23
Speaker
Right, so both laypeople and academics wildly overestimated how much the biases would favor men. They massively overestimated that. The academics slightly less than the laypeople, but not very much. But here's the moment to me that's the best finding in the entire paper.
00:44:45
Speaker
There were two types of academics, just academics across the disciplines and academics who identified themselves as having expertise in gender. So these are supposed experts at- And they were more biased probably, right?
00:45:01
Speaker
They were not more biased. They overestimated sexist biases to the exact same extent as chemistry professors and physics professors and professors who knew nothing had no bona fide expertise in any of this stuff. And what's amazing to me about that is
00:45:29
Speaker
although technically they were asked to predict the result of the men analysis. The men analysis was historical. It was based on 40 plus years of research. So in their field.
00:45:42
Speaker
in their field, in their field. So this is an utter failure of the gender experts throughout academia to understand and recognize the level, the exceedingly low, near zero levels of sex discrimination out there in the data, in the data that they should have actually known about.
00:46:07
Speaker
This actually, to me, harks back to your interview with Diego Renero, which was on political biases in the field. Without going a deep dive on their study, they do the study, they claim to have found no difference in replicability. I'm going to put aside my reservations about that study.
00:46:33
Speaker
almost none of the scholarship on political biases is about replicability. It's about stuff like this. It's about people claiming things that are just not true in the data. Now, just think through zillions of gender experts believing for 40 years that there are pervasive biases against women
00:46:59
Speaker
communicating that to their colleagues, to their students. They probably didn't keep it to themselves. It's highly unlikely that they kept that view to themselves. If you accept that they probably sometimes discussed it, then what you have is academia
00:47:20
Speaker
pervaded by discourse emphasizing sexist bias when in fact the data, at least with respect to the kinds of employment situations that this meta-analysis addressed, shows no bias whatsoever. That is the political bias.
00:47:36
Speaker
Yeah, it's certainly an example of political bias. One of the things, two hookah sides, for those interested, check out my interview with Diego Reniero that aired recently, and also check out Lee's Psychology Today article if you want to learn more about his concerns about Reniero's paper. Now, that said, I think as long as we're on this parallel between political bias and other types of bias,
00:48:02
Speaker
I do think it's interesting that the hypothesis that I think they started with is reasonable, at least to me on its face, how they measure it. We don't have to go into the details. But the hypothesis that if there's bias against group X, then group X needs to be better to make it. That's kind of what underlies this applicability test. And it's certainly a common narrative
00:48:28
Speaker
in the context of things like gender, right? You have to work twice as hard to get half as far, I think is a common saying people use. Have there been studies to test that? Like do you have to have
00:48:41
Speaker
a significantly better CV to get accolades or promoted as a female or a minority. I believe I'm aware of some studies with accolades that find the opposite, but have people taken the Reniero approach to those types of biases?
00:49:01
Speaker
My understanding is that with respect to demographic biases, there's only a small number of studies that address that and they do show the opposite. It's easier to get tenure with a
00:49:14
Speaker
you know, that women have an easier time getting tenure, meaning that they'll have a weaker Vida than men. So there's a just study of German sociologists where that was kind of resoundingly true and stuff. So whether it's always true, you know, and, you know, some of the pushback would be, well, but this academic life is so much harder for women that, you know, but just on the
00:49:44
Speaker
simple apples to apples VEDA question, there's evidence that the, if anything, the bias is going the other direction. And there is some older work, you know, and I think there's a lot that controlling for things like number of publications, status of publications, if I remember correctly, that openly conservative academics end up at lower status institutions.
00:50:12
Speaker
Yeah, I think I've seen that kind of thing in passing too. Okay, this is all fascinating stuff, but I wanna make sure we get to cancel culture.
Navigating Academia as a Heterodox Thinker
00:50:19
Speaker
So, you know, early in your career, wrote some papers that basically said, if I'm paraphrasing what you just said earlier, biases are small, people accurately perceive individual differences, people accurately perceive differences in group means, and people probably didn't like that you were saying that. So,
00:50:41
Speaker
So what happened? Tell me about your first brushes with cancel culture. Yeah, I mean, in the grand sweep of things.
00:50:53
Speaker
Um, I mostly it was fine, you know, the stuff got published got published in good journals Um, you know there was some harsh and a couple of personal experiences that were kind of nasty but I I wouldn't even call them cat. They were just sort of like people being assholes Um, yeah to be fair that's been my experience too with you know writing writing header header docs kind of stuff, you know on climate scenarios
00:51:20
Speaker
For example, you know, I'll see the stuff on on social media, especially on Twitter, where I'll do a little rant on political bias or something like that. And then there'll be some far lefty professor will will do this dunk. This has happened on and off for years. Oh, just just pissed off because the journals won't publish those papers, which I've never said that. And it's not true. I mean, I have not read the journals have published my papers. I'm like not complaining about that.
00:51:50
Speaker
Well, I think there's a really important point here for young scholars, right? The most impactful research occurs at the intersection of what's important and what isn't being done. And you have to think, why isn't it being done? And there's a number of different categories that I won't bore you with all of them, but certainly one of them is people are afraid to do it, right? And it's sort of, and it's otherwise obvious. And you can actually have, I think, a large impact
00:52:15
Speaker
and be rewarded for it in the big scheme of things by doing that. And that's certainly been my experience with scenarios. Interesting thing I find I'm seeing now is now I've got some research that's kind of displeasing to the left and some that's displeasing to the right. And so more or less everybody just kind of leaves me alone now. It's like, well, okay, he's not on a team. I'm not quite sure if you like him or don't and whose job it is to cancel him anyway.
00:52:44
Speaker
But okay, so let's fast forward then. You got some criticism, but nothing of the canceled variety for your early research. But you've been an early member, maybe even a founding member of Heterox Academy. You've been outspoken about political bias in the academy for at least a decade, if not more. And this all comes to a head in 2020 when academia has a,
00:53:12
Speaker
was the diplomatic way to say a moment of upheaval. And not only are you this visible heterodox person, you are the chair of the psychology department at Rutgers. And what happens? Yeah, well, I mean, that you can discuss. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there are several, there are actually several of these events.
00:53:40
Speaker
But the most extreme one and perhaps the most interesting one was the Fiedler on the Roof. Tell me about this one. Yeah. Yeah. So Klaus Fiedler was editor of perspectives on psych science. This was a big, big, big journal in psychology. A European psychologist submits a paper
00:54:09
Speaker
that's sort of a two-headed paper. It's sort of a critique of a previous paper by a biracial scholar, which will turn out to be relevant, advocating for diversity in all the ways that people advocate for diversity, right? It's like psychology, you know, the participants are, you know,
00:54:37
Speaker
Non-white participants have been understudied. There's too few editors who aren't white, and all this needs to be changed, and we need to have extensive pro-diversity initiatives and positionality statements. It's just sort of all this stuff.
00:55:00
Speaker
submits this article that is critique, starts as a critique of that article, but then uses it, my take on it, uses the critique as a platform to argue that the arguments for diversity
00:55:22
Speaker
which are usually restricted to groups that progressives deem oppressed or underrepresented, the scientific arguments are true writ large for all sorts of groups. So there's a social justice or reparative justice argument to be made for affirmative action and racial preferences and anything like that.
00:55:52
Speaker
different than the scientific argument. The scientific argument is that people bring different perspectives and different backgrounds and that this improves the science and all that sort of stuff. So Hamill points out, in my opinion correctly, that if it's about the quality of the science, then diversity is way more than race and more than oppressed groups.
00:56:23
Speaker
So Fiedler sends this out for review. He sends it to me and two or three other people. The reviews are very positive, very positive of Hamel's review, which means they are implicitly critical of this earlier paper because Hamel is critical of this earlier paper.
00:56:47
Speaker
So Fiedler then invites Roberts, the author of the original paper, to respond to this set of critiques.
00:56:56
Speaker
Well, hang on, aren't you skipping part where Fiedler invites the reviewers to publish their reviews? Yes, exactly. Absolutely. Fiedler thought the reviews were sufficiently thoughtful and interesting that the discussion should be made public. So he invited all three or four of us who did, I guess three of us plus Hamel, so three of us did the reviews to scale up our reviews into a commentary. Okay. So we do that.
00:57:27
Speaker
and then Roberts is invited to respond. You know, you could make a case that Fiedler kind of was more difficult. Some people would make the case that Fiedler was more difficult with Roberts than he should have been.
00:57:43
Speaker
So there's a lot of emails back and forth. And the reason we know this is because eventually Robert's released everything. And he released it all. He released it all. So it's all public now. When he released it, he denounced Fiedler, all of us, and especially me, as racists. And this triggered this social media mob, this massive mob.
00:58:13
Speaker
And a petition, I think, right? Yeah. Well, there was an open letter. There was an open letter signed by almost 1,400 academics. Yeah, one of them, I think, is now our dean of natural sciences. Anyway. Oh, really? Yeah. Oh, my god. Neither here nor there. Oh, man. You're leaving, though, right?
00:58:33
Speaker
Yeah, not because of that, to be absolutely clear. Not for any political reason, just to be absolutely clear in case anybody ever wonders or asks. Right. So the APS, the Association for Psych Science, which was the organization that publishes the journal, sort of pulled up everything short in a period of two or three days. They ousted Fiedler. From the editors of the journal.
00:59:01
Speaker
From the editorship, yeah. And they spent a year and a half ringing their hands about what to do with the articles they accepted, but they ultimately published them with a Roger Maris-style asterisk. Gotcha. Little thing saying, these are the papers that led to the ousting of Klaus Fiedler and better that. But they did publish them.
00:59:30
Speaker
But so a bunch of your colleagues across the country signed a letter, you know, saying you were racist. What else happened to you?
00:59:40
Speaker
Well, nothing else happened to me. I mean, I'm not trying to minimize that, but did anybody, did anybody try to, you know, send the letter to your Dean or, you know, were you still chair at the time? I can't remember how that happened, but not in this incident, right? I had that in other incidents. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But, but not in this one, no. I mean, it was a little bit uncomfortable within my department for a couple of weeks, you know, because of the denunciation and all this sort of stuff, but were you chair at the time or no, was this after you were chair? No, no, but then I was on sabbatical. Yeah.
01:00:15
Speaker
Ultimately, they published it. It was fine. The open letter called for the retraction of all the papers.
01:00:33
Speaker
It endorsed the calling of all of us racists and had all sorts of nasty authoritarian stuff in it. So I would say the open letter was pretty bad. It was a clear case of attempt to engage in reputational shaming and ostracism and all that stuff.
01:00:50
Speaker
but it didn't succeed. I mean, it might've succeeded in small circles, but it was fun. Okay, so let's unpack that. First of all, remind me, what year was this letter? I can't actually remember. 2022. Okay, 2022. So we're a couple of years removed from the absolute height of 2020 hysteria. So it sounds like
01:01:18
Speaker
Again, not to minimize the experience of having thousands of people sign a letter saying you're a bad person, which really is a bad thing. Have you perceived any material cost to your career? Did you start getting fewer invitations? It sounds like you already weren't chair. You have since become chair of a new department,
01:01:44
Speaker
Obviously, no one in the university read this letter and thought he shall never again be chair. Do you feel that there were any lasting consequences? If not, how much of that do you think has to do with the fact that the moment for such things had passed, and how much has to do with the fact that you're a known quantity?
01:02:09
Speaker
Does that make sense? Yeah, it's more the latter. I would say it's more the latter. I think there were a fair number of people long before this incident who, you know, I just generally piss off who don't like me, you know. And I don't think there are any more, there might be a few more, but the field is so gigantic, it just hardly matters. There's probably, in the US and Europe,
01:02:35
Speaker
which is where most social psychologists are, certainly who are going to review for English language journals, there's probably 20,000 social psychologists. And most of them don't care about these spats. Yeah, yeah, it's just not. That's my experience, too. Yeah, yeah. And by the way, that, now, to create me that the following is wrong, but my perception is that an important way, that goes both ways, right?
01:03:06
Speaker
While it's true from the perspective of somebody who might worry about engaging in heterodox scholarship that they may be overestimating the number of colleagues that will dislike them, it's also true both that probably conservatives outside the academy who read these news stories about these extreme letters get a biased high impression of how many faculty are actually like this and behave this way.
01:03:33
Speaker
number one. Yeah. I don't know what I think about that. I advised a dissertation a couple years ago, 2022 or 23, by Nate Honeycutt, who's now a researcher on Fire of the Foundation. Before you go on the drug hold, the other thing I was going to say was just that I wonder if it's also the case that people who engage in this behavior vastly underestimate how much their colleagues think they look stupid.
01:04:00
Speaker
Yeah, I think that is probably true. Corey Clark has a paper finding that... Oh, I saw this, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Would agree that the behavior is contemptible. So there is a lot of opposition to this, but at the same time... Yeah, tell me about Nate Honeycutt.
01:04:19
Speaker
So his dissertation surveyed almost 2,000 faculty and 2,000 grad students. It's like 1,800 each, something like that. And one of the centerpieces was he just asked them to identify, self-identify their politics. And 40% of the faculty self-identified as radicals, activists, Marxists, or socialists. That's 40%. By the way, I've said this in a couple of different contexts, but
01:04:43
Speaker
Like I try to imagine what would liberals do if it came out, for example, that schools of education, you know,
01:04:52
Speaker
Their most praised and cited and assigned texts were written by literal Nazi sympathizers, whose Nazi sympathizing was tied to their most important ideas that they're famous for. What will we do if we found that out? My guess is that liberals would, if anything, do more than what conservatives are doing. And yet if you replace Nazism with communism, that's pretty much the situation in today's schools of education.
01:05:14
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. You know, I've had like two or three viral tweets in my years on Twitter. And one was when I asked exactly this question, why is it that Nazism is so stigmatized, but Marxism is like, we're all, you know, it's fine. I mean, outside of conservative circles, it's wildly popular in intellectual circles. My theory is that, do you want to know, I think I have an answer to that. Do you want to hear it?
01:05:39
Speaker
Go for it. My answer is a positive one, not a normative one. This is why I think this is true. I don't agree with it. I think basically fascism and Nazism tells you it's evil. Because it does, it's easy to oppose it.
01:05:57
Speaker
Whereas communism and Marxism tells you it's good. And many, not all, some of the ways that it becomes evil are pretty explicit, you know, extensions of victim mentalities. But some of them are just because people who implement these ideologies are idiots, right? So if you think about like the great leap forward, you know, what do they want to do? They wanted to catch up to Britain in industrial
01:06:22
Speaker
prowess, and they wanted to reduce rural poverty. Well, who could be against that? But they had really dumb ideas that were ideologically driven about how to do that. And so my theory is that because the far left does damage through naivety as much or more as through explicit malice, or even when it's explicit malice, it's kind of couched in high-minded language.
01:06:45
Speaker
Both, it's harder to oppose, but also it will tend to do more damage. So I suspect that that's why communism killed more people than Nazism.
Ideological Extremes in Academia
01:06:53
Speaker
I suspect that's why the violent protests and anti-police stuff in 2020 killed way more people than January 6th, et cetera. Anyway, that's my theory to answer your question.
01:07:03
Speaker
No, I think that sort of analysis was part of what came up. People responded. They were very thoughtful. And that was a major theme of some of the responses. That Marxism is cloaked in benevolence. I mean, my question was about Nazism. You brought in fascism, which probably would have been a better question. Nazism was also a local nationalistic ideology.
01:07:27
Speaker
Some people say it's right, but also left. That's why I would say fascism. Just kind of get, get away from that. I mean, the other thing is that naive, high-minded stupidity is I think something that academia is uniquely vulnerable to, right? Because we, we don't.
01:07:46
Speaker
We don't harm ourselves directly by being wrong. It's not like we're soldiers on a battlefield who die if we make a bad decision or business people who lose money if we make a bad decision. The main direct feedback that we get is peer review and so having attention-grabbing ideas and pleasing ideas
01:08:04
Speaker
can be as important in some cases as having correct ideas. And because of academic freedom, which is good and important, we are intentionally shielded by our profession from the consequences of our bad ideas. Because if we didn't, then we wouldn't be as willing to take risks, which again, if understood properly, is a good thing that we take risks.
01:08:23
Speaker
But I always tell my students, this is why academics need to be particularly humble intellectually because we are one of the only places in the world that's set up to enable stupidity in the name of intelligence. And we need to be aware of that and humble, yeah. I agree with all that. I would put it slightly differently, although I completely agree with it. And that's that for most of our ideas, we have no skin in the game.
01:08:48
Speaker
Yeah, that's what I was getting at. So we can go off and on on things that kind of sound good and are impressive to our colleagues for years or decades or whatever. And you know, we can kind of thrive more narrowly.
01:09:04
Speaker
In my field, you can do some flashy study that I cited thousands and thousands of times, garners hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of dollars of grants to study with its stereotype thread or microaggressions or implicit bias.
01:09:23
Speaker
And then, as over the next 30 or 40 years, the stuff is found either to be irreplicable or just not what it's cracked up to be. The stereotype threat stuff looks like it's irreplicable. The implicit bias stuff looks like most of the key claims have had to be walked back, at least to anyone except an advocate. There was a recent
01:09:48
Speaker
target article on implicit bias and discussion. One of the commentaries described it as a degenerating line of research because rather than studying implicit bias as a psychological phenomenon, it's like the ins and outs of what the IAT actually measures. Does it measure this? That's what it's called, the degenerating line of research. So retreat and retreat and retreat. Anyway, but that takes 20, 30, 40 years to unfold. And if you're the person
01:10:16
Speaker
who originated it 30, 40 years ago, you've already had a great career. You've become a prestigious eminent professor. You've been admitted to the National Academies of Science. You've been grant funded your entire career. You've had a great career.
01:10:31
Speaker
And there's a parallel to political extremes among just citizens, right? Demographically, both extreme ends of the spectrum in the US are disproportionately rich, white, and educated. And when I try to explain that intuitively to people, what I always say is like, look, if you're on the extreme ends,
01:10:48
Speaker
If you're in the middle, if you're in the margins, politics affects your day-to-day life viscerally, and you don't have the luxury to experiment with getting rid of the police, for example. But if you're on the extremes, politics is a shirt, and you want your shirt to be more colorful and more attention-grabbing than your neighbor's shirt. That's great.
01:11:11
Speaker
This is fascinating, but I do want to get back to cancer culture a little bit, because I think you have an interesting take on it. And you've written advice for how to withstand it and all that stuff. So let me ask you this. You alluded to instances where people demanded that you be removed, say, as chair or face some material consequence beyond just denouncing you. How did the leaders of your university respond?
01:11:42
Speaker
And how did you respond? Well, so, uh, the first, well, this was the first time I was exposed to all of this was maybe 2018 or 2019. Um, and.
01:12:08
Speaker
Someone I know from Twitter. She also had a podcast years ago. I was on it tweeted something like maybe it was a response to some overwrought claims about sexism She tweeted something like Women women are doing just fine. Thank you very much or women in America are doing just fine. There's something like that. I
01:12:34
Speaker
And this, I don't know whether she was a grad student or a postdoc in Ireland. She was an immigrant from some African country. I don't remember which one at this point. Quote tweeted that, white women, white womening. Oh yeah, I remember when that was a saying. That was a thing. And on Twitter, I called that a racist sneer.
01:13:04
Speaker
Because it is. Because it is. Anyway, what happened? Okay, so I actually have a paper, it's more of an essay for a collection for an edited book that goes through this in some detail, which I might post on my sub-stack at some point. She
01:13:29
Speaker
accuses me of harassing her, and of course of being a racist and harassing her, and she has enough of a following that hundreds of people start denouncing me. And some contact Rutgers. They send emails, they tag Rutgers on Twitter, and this got to my dean. So I was chair at the time.
01:13:56
Speaker
And, uh, my, uh, associate Dean, whoever had, have a good, he's no longer Dean. I had a good relationship with, I meet with him on stuff all the time because it's always business to take care of. We have one of those meetings, we do regular business. And then at the end, he brings up this little Twitter firestorm and he says two things. You have the academic freedom to do anything you like, to say pretty much anything you like.
01:14:26
Speaker
And Rutgers is a public university, correct? Yeah. So you are, you are covered by the First Amendment. Yeah. Yeah. Yes, absolutely. So you're not going to get fired for anything like this. But the administration really doesn't want to be embroiled in this kind of controversy. And, you know, I'm paraphrasing now, because it was whatever, six, six, seven years ago, they don't have to actually keep you on as chair. Gotcha.
01:14:54
Speaker
And so now this is beginning to get my back up. But then he says, which brought back some of the heat for me, do you really want to court this kind of nonsense? Do you really want to get involved in this? Is this what you want to spend your time doing? And that actually calmed me down. And I came around.
01:15:18
Speaker
to agreeing that he was basically right, that I really didn't need that. And so I agreed to back off those kinds of confrontations, which I did. I still engaged in certain kinds, but there were ways I could avoid stuff like that. And I have. Tell me if this is in the same spirit.
01:15:47
Speaker
I always try to call out patterns rather than specific people as much as possible. Because usually if something that a specific person is doing is worth calling out, it's a pattern. And then usually if it's a pattern, it's not necessarily fair to call the specific person. I would say the only exception, which you might relate to is if it's in direct response to somebody attacking me directly.
01:16:15
Speaker
Yeah. See, I don't know what to do with that because there's certainly nothing wrong with highlighting dysfunctional patterns. So that's fine. But it almost goes back to something at least kindred to or adjacent to having skin in the game. That is, it's one thing to call it a pattern. It's another thing to recognize it when it manifests in the real world.
Reforming Higher Education
01:16:41
Speaker
And the only way to do that is to highlight the instances of it in the real world, which usually means referring to a particular person, because it's people who do these things. Actually, let me ask you a follow-up question, because this is something that I've often struggled with. And if you read my recent Chronicle of Higher Education piece, you might recognize this particular struggle.
01:17:08
Speaker
You know, there are a lot of things happening in academia that, you know, you and I and 80% of Americans would find concerning. And I happen to know where the skeletons are buried at the universities I've been in recently.
01:17:25
Speaker
But I also have no reason to think that the skeletons in my university are any worse than the skeletons in other universities. And I'm referring to my current university, Colorado, as far as I know, actually, my new university is leading the way in reform in some of the areas that we would identify as reform. And I also don't know if they have skeletons where they are yet. And then couple that with the fact that
01:17:54
Speaker
you know, most of my colleagues are good people doing good work, you know, trying and trying to do so in an upstanding way. And so that's where I find the struggle happens is like, is, is, is so far my instinct has been, I would rather call out the general phenomenon and only, you know, show the receipts
01:18:23
Speaker
in cases where people are not going to believe that the general phenomenon exists if I don't, you know, the Chronicle of Higher Education piece on diversity hiring being an example. And again, even there, I tried to be up above board, you know, I explicitly reached out to the head of issues management of the campus and some of the other leaders before publishing the article to make sure I had my facts right. And to also make clear. I didn't read that. I didn't know which one you were referring to. So I'm like, what is he talking about? I did read. Yeah, that was a great piece. And thank you.
01:18:55
Speaker
Partly to make sure I got my facts right and also just to make clear that they knew that the point of my writing that article was the start of national conversation about a national phenomenon, it wasn't to embarrass them even though I recognized that one of the examples I was providing might embarrass them.
01:19:13
Speaker
So yeah, what's your, what's your take on this? Because I think it's parallel to what you're talking about in this case. You know, do you call out, if somebody's behaving badly, do you call that person out specifically by name and invite this type of controversy, which can seem petty. We're on the one hand. Yeah. Yeah. What do you think? We all have to choose our battles, right? You know, you can't fight every battle. You can't fight every stupid thing that comes along out there, right?
01:19:39
Speaker
there's that. Then there's, you know, one of the things I have really backed off from a lot is doing battle on Twitter because it's just, it's useless. You're not, you know, it's just, I'm with you there. Yeah. Yeah. It's just not, I mean, there is a lot of like revelation. It's almost like,
01:19:59
Speaker
We almost need something like a libs of TikTok for academia. I mean, she's become just a right wing poster. But for a while, she was posting all this crazy stuff. Yeah, I was quoted once recently in a Christian Science Monitor piece about controversy in climate science, where apparently I said to her in the interview, the worst thing to happen to climate scientists on Twitter was climate scientists on Twitter.
01:20:25
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah, right, okay. Which is I think kind of what you're talking about. We've done far more damage to reputations just by pulling the bail over how we talked to each other. Yeah, exactly. So there's that. But then there are peer review articles. I mean, my view is that anything in a peer review article is fair game.
01:20:46
Speaker
I mean, it's sort of how science is supposed to work. So that may mean me saying this particular article by these particular researchers is a disaster area. Here's what it claims. Here's why I think it is spectacularly wrong. So that strikes me as complete fair game. You can't do that with every article you don't like, but you know, you choose your battles and in some sense, the
01:21:15
Speaker
people or person whose article you're criticizing will probably feel attacked. You know, they might feel that even though, even if it's a completely sort of analysis critique of the claims in the article, they feel it's a personal attack and they may respond accordingly. Even if you don't, by the way, criticize them
01:21:40
Speaker
directly, you think one of the things I always tell my graduate students is you need to develop whether or not you engage in controversial topics, you should develop a thick skin because if you want to do paradigm shifting research, you're going to end up breaking somebody's paradigm, they're probably gonna be somebody who's powerful and unhappy that you did that.
01:21:58
Speaker
Right. Yes, that's exactly right. You do need a thick skin to do that. Your original point is this going back and forth between general principles or patterns and calling out individual people or using concrete examples. For me, it's not a hard distinction because you need
01:22:23
Speaker
You can't call out every example. Sometimes it may be just inappropriate. Sometimes you just don't want to deal with the conflict that it will ensue. But if you decide to do battle over some principle or some pattern that you see is dysfunctional, then identifying specific instances which will usually be linked to people
01:22:48
Speaker
can be necessary. So let me ask you this, two more questions or high level questions and then we should wrap up.
01:23:00
Speaker
So we talked a little bit about how to face down cancel culture when it comes after you. And you've written about it. I encourage folks to look up unsafe science as your sub-stack. You've talked about how you don't apologize, maybe in brackets, unless you have something to apologize for, kind of in your own view. Pick your battles. Don't back down from principled ones.
01:23:25
Speaker
But I think the flip side that we talk about less, especially in spaces, heterodox spaces, is how do you engage as a heterodox person who will sometimes face public attacks without becoming a reactionary, anti-woke, tinfoil hat, MAGA crusader, right?
01:23:49
Speaker
And I won't name names because I'm calling about patterns and not people, but we all know some examples of such folks.
01:23:59
Speaker
Because maybe in academia we're shielded a little bit from the incentives of this, but I think as you go a little bit outside of academia, the incentives are really strong, right? There's many people, and by the way, I'm not included. I don't think Jordan Peterson has become this. I think he has idiosyncratic range of views, some of which are conservative that he's been fairly consistent on.
01:24:21
Speaker
But he has this saying that I really think is funny, where he says that he monetized social justice warriors. And you can see, you know, he's become very wealthy, you know, largely due to the public persona that he's gained from kind of being an early heterodox person. And you see, you know, some other folks, and again, I won't name names, but there are definitely some other
01:24:47
Speaker
public pundits, some of whom started as academics and some who didn't, who have gone down this rabbit hole of becoming very reactionary, kind of very hard right. And, you know, and there's clearly an incentive for it, you're kind of you're rejected by this crowd, and then this crowd embraces you with open arms, and you want to be liked by somebody and you don't want to be the person that kind of nobody likes and nobody trusts.
01:25:09
Speaker
Plus, there's all these financial incentives. You keep getting invited to these turning point USA conferences where you can talk about how horrible the lives are, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So how have you met my perception, and please correct me if I'm wrong and you've actually become a firebrand reactionary without me noticing.
01:25:31
Speaker
But my impression is that, you know, kind of like Jordan Peterson and others of varying views, you know, you have a set of views, some of which are provocative and some of which are heterodox, but I don't sense that you've really changed your views that much, you know, as this cancel culture period has gone on. And so kind of, you know, how do you think about that? Do you ever feel the pull of like, gosh, if I was just like a little bit more of a tinfoil hat magga person, I could have more subscribers on my sub-sac.
01:26:00
Speaker
or not. Do not think about this. Yeah, I mean, you laid out what the seductive appeal of that, I think, is, right? It's like, you're rejected over here, you're welcome over there. There are incentives, both social and financial, to do that. So, I mean, it's very seductive.
01:26:20
Speaker
Um, so I can see why people do that. That doesn't really answer your question. You're answering questions. Why haven't you do that? That's my question. I like can't do it because I don't believe most. It's just like, I, you know, I'm not going to, I'm not going to pretend to believe something to gain all this other stuff. So that's off the table for me. And do you think that in a way that's related to your.
01:26:42
Speaker
your ability to be heterodox in the first place amidst cancel culture. What I always say to people about my heterodoxy is I don't actually like conflict. I'm a good Canadian that way. I strongly dislike conflict. But I also find bending the knee ideologically when intellectual integrity is supposed to be my trade so humiliating that I refuse to do it for anybody, be them progressive academics or conservatives.
01:27:09
Speaker
Yeah. For me, that speaks for me. I'm sort of center-left in my politics. I ran an indivisible group. You know what an indivisible group is? No.
01:27:27
Speaker
So these were these small political action groups formed in the aftermath of Trump's election. Oh, yes. Okay. Yes. Yes. I do remember these. Yeah. But anyway, our listeners may not. So please continue. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So they were, yeah, there were small, you know, leftist political action groups and mine were small. I only did for about a year, but we were, I don't want to attribute this to my group. My group was part of,
01:27:54
Speaker
Um, a very successful effort. You may remember in 2017, Trump was elected president. Republicans had both the house and the Senate. Yeah. And one of their first orders of business was to repeal Obamacare. Almost. But yes. Well, that was their agenda was to appeal it. Yes, it has. Yeah. I know. Yeah. And
01:28:21
Speaker
It came up to votes in both the House and the Senate. And my group, I live in a town in New Jersey that at the time had a moderate Republican congressman. And we engage, we, the big we, not just my group. We were part of a series of linked individual groups.
01:28:44
Speaker
Our goal was to flip that Congressman from being willing to appeal Obamacare to vote against the repeal. And we succeeded. You can look this up. Leonard Lance, Republican Congressman 2017, New Jersey.
01:29:01
Speaker
voted against the repeal. And there's a broad pattern here, by the way, which is that contrary to what most academics believe, the median voter is an economic progressive and a social conservative. Yeah. So the Republicans elites pull them into unpopular economic positions and the Democratic elites pull them into unpopular cultural ones. OK, I've already taken up too much of your time. So I wanted to finish with one question. And just the setup for it is that this is my last season as host of the Free Mind podcast. There's four episodes in the season.
01:29:30
Speaker
And each of the guests are in some way connected to the conversation about higher ed reform. To what extent is it needed?
01:29:40
Speaker
How should we go about it? Anybody can look you up and see that you think that it's needed. So I'm not even going to ask you that. But let me ask you about the how to do it part. And I would say among heterodox academics, I've encountered three schools of thought. There's the school thought of any government intervention is a threat to academic freedom and is a slippery slope not worth going down.
01:30:06
Speaker
There's a school of thought of academia is so captured ideologically, not just by the left, but by the far left, that they won't reform themselves, especially given the peer review reward structures without significant government intervention. So we have to do it. And by the way, government is accountable to the people anyway, and we get so much government money that there should be accountability to the popular whim, you know, academic freedom be damned.
01:30:32
Speaker
And then the third group, which in my experience among heterodoxy, what I've talked to, I would say is the largest numerically is kind of in between. And it's kind of like, and I don't like this analogy and I apologize if it's in delicate, but, uh, you know, the, the chemotherapy analogy basically is like chemotherapy is bad for the human body, but when you have cancer, you need it. And, and, and so too with government intervention and academia, the basic government intervention.
01:30:56
Speaker
in academia is a slippery slope. It does threaten academic freedom. So the first group is right, but the second group is right too that we're not going to fix ourselves. And so some type of government intervention is necessary. What's your take? And if you support government intervention, what types and how, and if not, why not?
01:31:16
Speaker
Yeah, well, the second and third groups don't seem to me all that different, actually. It's just the third group has a metaphor for why the second group is basically justified, right? It's like... Well, let me expand that. First of all, I will own the metaphor. I've never heard it from anyone's mouth except for mine. It's not a bad metaphor. But here's what I think it is different, right? Is that the third group is...
01:31:44
Speaker
in my experience, much more cautious about what types of government intervention they'll endorse, right? So government intervention to enforce academic freedom policies, even to enforce institutional neutrality, sure. Government intervention
01:32:00
Speaker
to ban things that sound like certain disciplines, even ones that they find intellectually vacuous and morally reprehensible. They're not on board with an academic freedom grounds. They don't really like and or not really comfortable with what Chris Rufo is doing in New College of Florida, but maybe they're okay with most of what's going on at University of Florida or University of North Carolina.
01:32:23
Speaker
Does that make sense? The second camp is really like, yeah, we just got to come in with a bulldozer and raise everything and then rebuild it. I apologize if I'm mischaracterizing Chris Ruvo's view there, and those who do agree with him. Yeah. Society-wide, I would actually endorse all of that.
01:32:48
Speaker
because we don't know what's going to work and we don't know what's necessary. So I don't know that Rufo's come in with a bulldozer. I mean, they're coming in and what has he done? He's changed some hiring requirements and stuff. What else has he done? Well, I think he's moved. Did he close the department or department closed?
01:33:11
Speaker
I know you're in the DEI office, but that's that that's different. That's not. Yeah. But I thought that the women's the women's studies department was was under threat. I mean, even if that's not the case in Chris Rufo's case, you know, I can tell you that the parts of the legislature in Wyoming where I'm going as twice tried to defund the gender studies department. Yeah. So I'm blocked by the modern Republicans, I should add. Really? Because people think sometimes it's left, right? And blocked on the free speech grounds.
01:33:40
Speaker
Right, right. Yeah. So, well, good for them. You know, there is this strong, my sense is there is a strong libertarian current throughout the western states. That's correct. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, they were most of the first states to legalize marijuana, which, you know, you would think that would happen on the East Coast. Well, I think Wyoming was the first state to give women the vote.
01:34:08
Speaker
Yeah, so that's just very interesting politically. It's because people think about Democrats and Republicans on this left-right thing, but an authoritarian is kind of different. So anyway, some of the legislation, especially the Florida legislation seems to me to be, it's not just anti-academic freedom, it's anti-free speech. Like the government can't be in the business of telling people what they can and cannot say, including people at colleges and universities. So that legislation is a problem.
01:34:39
Speaker
The governors using their authority to install the board of governor representatives that they want, that strikes me as a legitimate use of political authority. If you don't want your governor to have that power, change the damn state laws and conditions. Right, exactly. The constitutions in the states are explicit that they have that power.
01:35:00
Speaker
Yeah. I agree. And that state universities have some degree of being beholden to the state, basically the people of the state as represented by their elected officials, that doesn't strike me as ridiculous either. So whether states or the federal government want to alter funding
01:35:25
Speaker
based on various practices, that seems like a legitimate use of power. But let's again, without extending this episode longer than I booked you for, although we could talk for hours, it'd be fascinating.
Political Influence on Academia
01:35:42
Speaker
It strikes me that the devil is in the details there a little bit, right? Saying that elected officials have the power to install politically appointed trustees, sure, that's explicitly the case in some states.
01:35:54
Speaker
the trustees have the power to oversee some university practices. Okay, again, sure. But it does matter a little bit which ones, right? So in Colorado, where our trustees are elected, you know, directly by the people, you know, even there, there's very clear norms and rules about what they control and the trustees, they call them Regents, what the Regents control and what the Regents don't control. And in particular, that every effort is made to not allow the Regents to control the curriculum.
01:36:24
Speaker
for academic freedom reasons. Right. Controlling the curriculum, I haven't thought much about control. Control seems like a bad idea. But controlling hiring and what departments and programs and positions, that strikes me as a completely legitimate exercise of the authority of the Board of Governors.
01:36:45
Speaker
even if that power is wielded against departments for nakedly political reasons, right? We are defunding this department because we don't like your politics. Well, there's defunding. I didn't talk about funding. Sorry, that's what we were talking about. I don't know of specific examples of trustees doing this to departments, except maybe at the New College of Florida, but I can't remember. But certainly that's a concern, right? That politically motivated
01:37:15
Speaker
trustees would go after departments for political reasons and that would erode academic freedom. And I think my impression of at least the pundits who write about this is that some of them are okay with that and think it's necessary and some think it's a slippery slope. The devil is always in the details. If a university decides that it is about political activism, then having a department that is a politically active
01:37:41
Speaker
activist department is completely consistent with the mission. If the university decides that it is about truth-seeking and institutional neutrality, and it has a department that's up to its ears in activism, I think it would be completely justified to excise that department. As a violation of his mission. Well, on that not at all controversial note, we'll end there.
Closing Remarks and Future Directions
01:38:12
Speaker
Thanks so much, Lee Justin, for coming on the Free Mind Podcast. Fascinating, as always. I encourage our listeners to check out your unsafe science blog, look you up on Google Scholar, look up your research, and you are often a guest on these sorts of podcasts and other types of popular forums, outspoken and well-spoken, heterodox academic. So thanks again, and I'm sure we'll see you around. Thank you. It's been a great conversation, Matt. Thank you.
01:38:39
Speaker
The Free Mind podcast is produced by the Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization at the University of Colorado Boulder. You can email us feedback at freemind at colorado.edu or visit us online at colorado.edu slash center slash benson. You can also find us on social media. Our Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube accounts are all at Benson Center.
01:39:04
Speaker
Our Instagram is at The Benson Center and the Facebook is at Bruce D. Benson Center.