Reader Suzi pointed me to a RealClear Science article about subjects that cause controversy in psychology—but also in biology and among people in general. Click the top headline to see their short summary of a longer paper in Perspectives in Psychological Science, a paper you can access by clicking the second title.
While you can click the title below to get to the article, you can also find the pdf here.
The purpose of this study was severalfold, and I’m not going to go into all the questions and conclusions. What I found most interesting was the authors’ list of ten taboo conclusions about psychology and society, the degree of confidence that psychologists had in these conclusions, the degree to which psychologists would self-censor their opinions on these topics (and the correlation with their agreement between censorship and belief), and, finally, the consensus on academic freedom—the assent of psychologists that people should be able to study whatever they wanted.
First, the authors asked 41 psychologists to give a list of what they saw as “controversial” conclusions. From this they distilled the ten most controversial ones, often using their own phrasing to state the conclusions clearly.
Then, the authors gave these conclusions to a bigger sample of psychologists: 470 who agreed to answer the questions (4,603 were asked). Among other things, they were asked to state their degree of confidence in the answers and then their reluctance to share their views, whatever they were. They were also asked whether “scholars should be completely free to pursue research questions without fear of institutional punishment.”
I’ve put below the list of ten c0ntroversial conclusions derived from the preliminary survey, along with the average degree of agreement for each conclusion among the scholars who gave answers (not all 470 answered every question). First, how the scholars were asked to agree/disagree and how they judged their degree of risk that would make them self-censor (this is all from the paper itself):
Participants were told they would be responding to 10 taboo conclusions in the social sciences that were nominated by their peers in earlier interviews. First, participants responded to three questions regarding each conclusion on 101-point sliding scales (ranging from 0 to 100): “How confident are you in the truth or falsity of this statement?” (responses ranged from 100% confident it is false to 100% confident it is true), x
Participants then reported how at risk they would feel of various consequences if they shared their views on these topics openly on a sliding scale ranging from no risk at all to very high risk. (All sliding scales used in our study had a range of 0–100.)
After each question, I’ve put in bold the average degree of confidence among the respondents about whether they consider the conclusion to be true. Notice that the first question is about whether men were naturally selective to be sexually coercive, a conclusion I attacked strongly when younger (I’d have a more nuanced answer now, I think). Note that two of the questions, #4, #7, are taken up by Luana and me in our paper in Skeptical Inquirer, and we have high confidence in them (I just asked Luana, and we agreed that we both have 100% confidence in those two conclusions).
So here are the top ten hot potatoes in human psychology along with the average degree of agreement.
1. “The tendency to engage in sexually coercive behavior likely evolved because it conferred some evolutionary advantages on men who engaged in such behavior.” (53.47)
2. “Gender biases are not the most important drivers of the under-representation of women in STEM fields.” (45.26)
3. “Academia discriminates against Black people (e.g., in hiring, promotion, grants, invitations to participate in colloquia/symposia).” (59.29)
4. “Biological sex is binary for the vast majority of people.” (66.10)
5. “The social sciences (in the United States) discriminate against conservatives (e.g., in hiring, promotion, grants, invitations to participate in colloquia/symposia).”(52.06)
6. “Racial biases are not the most important drivers of higher crime rates among Black Americans relative to White Americans.” (46.93)
7. “Men and women have different psychological characteristics because of evolution.” (65.50)
8. “Genetic differences explain non-trivial (10% or more) variance in race differences in intelligence test scores.” (29.10)
9. “Transgender identity is sometimes the product of social influence.” (54.11)
10. “Demographic diversity (race, gender) in the workplace often leads to worse performance.” (21.44)
Note that for most topics psychologists had split opinions, but not for racial differences in IQ being somewhat based on genetic differences (question 8) or diversity leading to worse performance (question 10). In both cases a big majority of people disagreed The highest agreement, though, came for the questions that Luana and I discussed (sex being binary for the vast majority of people and men and women had different psychological traits because of evolution. It is surprising that questions whose answers are dead obvious, like the two I just mentioned, don’t have close to 100% agreement, which means that psychologists don’t know much about the binary nature of biological sex or about evolutionary psychology (note that question 7 doesn’t say that ALL psychological differences between men and women are evolved; it implies only that some of them are, which to me seems palpably true, e.g., differences in attentiveness to their offspring or the degree of choosiness in mating).
What I found almost as interesting to me is that there was, with one exception, a positive correlation between the degree of belief of individuals in these statements and their reluctance to share their views. Can you guess what the exception is?
Here are two graphs showing particularly strong correlations between degree of belief of a controversial statement and the degree of “self-censorship”; each point represents one individual. Surprisingly, the first one is the binary nature of biological sex. The more strongly you accept it, the more likely you are to keep it to yourself. That’s not true for Luana and me! It’s bloody obvious and we’ll shout it from the rooftops!
This one is more understandable as it’s the hottest of the hot potatoes: the claim that IQ differences between races are appreciable (at least 10% of the difference is based on genetic differences). The more you think that IQ differences between races are genetic, the more likely you are to keep it to yourself:
Did you guess that the one statement that people didn’t self-censor about was a statement in line with liberal ideology. Yes, it’s this one: “Academia discriminates against Black people (e.g., in hiring, promotion, grants, invitations to participate in colloquia/symposia).” The more confidence you have in that, that more likely you are to espouse it publicly, because it makes you seem less racist to be public about it.
All of the correlations, negative and positive, were statistically significant.
The authors note two differences in responses between males and females (that assumes a sex binary!), though of course these not be based on genetics or evolution (bolding is mine):
As seen in Table 3 and Figure S1 in the Supplemental Material, men believed more strongly in the truth of every single taboo conclusion relative to women, with two exceptions: (a) For political bias in social science, there was a small but not significant effect in the same direction, and (b) women believed more strongly that academia discriminates against Black people. In some cases, differences were quite large. For example, female psychologists (on average) were quite confident that academia discriminates against Black people, but male psychologists (on average) were on the fence; male psychologists (on average) were quite confident that men and women evolved different psychological characteristics, but female psychologists (on average) were on the fence. Future research should explore whether male and female psychology professors present to their students different evidence and arguments regarding the veracity of taboo conclusions.
As has been noted by some, women are likely to be more empathic than men, and this may explain the result vis-à-vis racial differences. Here’s another:
Female scholars were more left-leaning (M = 20.86, SD = 16.03) than male scholars (M = 27.90, SD = 18.70), t(401) = 3.93, p < .001, and younger, t(400) = 4.73, p < .001.
Since most academics are left leaning, I would expect this sex difference based on my hypothesis (which is not mine) that females are more empathic than men, and being more empathic makes you lean even more to the left (a hypothesis that is mine).
Finally, although self-censorship is rife in academia, I was glad to see that most scholars (but only by a bare majority) don’t think that people should be penalized for working on anything they want.
A slim majority of professors (52.3%) reported that scholars should be completely free to pursue research questions without fear of institutional punishment for their conclusions. By contrast,1.6% said scholars should not have this freedom, and 46.0% said it’s complicated.
Well, it is a bit complicated, for, as we said in our discussion in Amsterdam, there are some questions (though very few) that people should not be free to work on. But such work is banned anyway by research stipulations of granting agencies and academia, as this work involve harm to humans and other animals (i.e., the kind of experiments on inmates that Josef Mengele did in Auschwitz). Readers may want to think of some questions NOT involving harm to humans and other species that still should not be allowed. Right off the bat I can’t think of any. There are plenty of experiments that I think are not worthy of doing on humans, but none that should be banned if they don’t cause mental or physical harm.
The belief in academic freedom does conflict with the ability of researchers to investigate some of the questions above, particularly those that have implications for social policy (i.e. is there bias against blacks or women in academia?). It’s the “politically correct” thing to say that there is, but you really need to know how much bias there is versus other factors (culture, preference, etc) that can cause inequity before you start intervening to achieve equity. But I’ve discussed this before.
It would be a good thing if people didn’t have to self-censor, for that kind of censorship inhibits free discussion, the kind of discussion essential for a university to function and for people to examine their ideas and/or sharpen them. But we’ll never get rid of self-censorship on questions like the ones above so long as academia is pervaded by ideology, which it must be since scientists are humans and don’t want others to think poorly of them.
Cool, thanks.
“dead obvious, like the two I just mentioned, don’t have close to 100% agreement,”
This sort of drives me up the wall! How could anyone believe that sex is not binary, for example?
My guess is that few psychologists take more than a year of college biology, where sex is (probably) treated as a binary. Most of their training veers away from biology early and, from then on, they are subjected to all of the other concepts that are confusing matters: gender, gender dysphoria, sexuality and sexuality disorders, homosexuality, transsexuality, etc. By the time they get into actual practice, psychologists have long forgotten the biological definition of sex (based on gamete size and number) and have confused all of the correlates of sex with the definition of sex itself.
The “psychology” that you refer to is probably clinical psychology, which is one of several branches of the discipline, and not even the largest — and going back to Durkheim’s ‘rules of the sociological method,’ clinical psychology is predicated on the assumption that there is such a thing as a “mind” that is distinct from a brain, and can be addressed clinically — no biology needed, save that for the psychiatrists.
But the rest of the profession offers a very different picture. “Psychology” there has become a branch of neurophysiology. Research on behavior, for example, leaps between two levels of phenomena: overt behavior and a neurobiological [cause], completely eliminating a middle step of “mind”.
So I think your characterization is accurate for clinical psych, but many of us in the social sciences have been struck by the retreat of other types of “psychology” from its, well, psychological roots. At my university, for example, about 20 years ago, the psychology department petitioned successfully to be shifted from the “social science division” to the “natural sciences division”.
Because they think that if it is binary, it “erases” trans people, at least those who think that sex can be change. It doesn’t erase them, or shouldn’t, since the sex binary is just a fact of biology and says nothing about how trans people should be treated (it’s simple morality and civility that tells us that. But this is part of what happens when you sneak ideology into science.
I am puzzled by #3. Is the taboo viewpoint that “Academia discriminates against Black people…?” Or is it taboo to assert that “Academia does not discriminate against Black people?” I thought that the former was a generally held belief that justifies racial preferences in university hiring?
The truth is that these days there is rampant and blatant discrimination in favour of black people in US academia (in the hard sciences a black male needs a track record only a third as good as a white male in order to get a tenure-track job; a black female would need even less). But one has to pretend that it’s the reverse.
Old data but more recent trends are similar.
x.com/eyeslasho/status/1706319646176227391
I find it curious that the time when blacks and women were actually discriminated against produced brilliant black female mathematicians, while today’s best known black female scholars are “studies” professors with few publications of dismal quality that, to cap it all, turn out to be plagiarized.
“Academia does not discriminate against Black people?” is the taboo statement.
It’s good to see some numbers posted on these topics. It’s quite unfortunate (but understandable) that psychologists would self-censor, particularly if they did so in a clinical setting. Imagine patient X, with disorder Y, *not* being made aware of the disorder—and therefore not receiving treatment—simply because the psychologist was too afraid to speak the truth.
BTW, you mention your discussion in Amsterdam. I watched it, and it was very good. I hope it gets a wide audience.
It’s worth pointing out that the survey was done in the summer of 2021, which was likely the high-water mark of wokeness; by 2024, hopefully more people will have come to their senses.
Also, the scatter in “belief in truth of” such statements is remarkable. I’m tempted to suppose that it ranges all the way from those who judge these statements on the evidence, to those who judge whether they conform to ideology.
Has anyone seen their confidence in the social sciences increase today?!
Is it the questions that Mengele was (supposedly) “investigating” that are taboo or was it his disregard for the moral worth of his “subjects” that cause us not to allow Mengelian “experiments” today? As well as not being good science at all.
Let’s say you wanted to determine if twins could safely receive blood transfusions from each other, one of Mengele’s curiosities. You could work this out safely by checking for in vitro evidence of agglutination or hemolysis, which is what we do today with cross-matching. This had been well worked out by the time Mengele was active. There was no need then or now to transfuse uncrossedmatched blood of unknown ABO group into a sibling to see if he got sick or died, to answer that research question.
Mengele would surely have known that monozygotic twins have the same ABO and Rh groups but they can differ in the acquired blood groups that could result from one twin having been transfused earlier in life while the other hadn’t. Dizygotic twins are no more likely than any set of siblings to share blood groups, innate or acquired, which Mengele also surely knew. So his fetish for twins was just that: a fetish which has no scientific value. You can debunk his other experiments similarly. I picked transfusion just because one can imagine how the information from the “experiments” if scientifically valid might be useful.
I would argue that the only research questions that should be taboo are those which, despite being scientifically interesting, cannot be answered without unethical treatment of human subjects. “Do Jewish subjects tolerate deliberate infection with typhus better or worse than Aryan or Slavic subjects?” Even if these questions were scientifically interesting or relevant to public policy in ways I can’t imagine, the experiments inherently, unavoidably abuse human subjects and are taboo. But it’s the methods, not the racially charged questions themselves, that are forbidden. Observing the mortality rates from natural typhus — there was no treatment available then — among different races and publishing the results would not be unethical. We made the same comparisons with Covid-19. If a certain investigational treatment didn’t work at all in black patients, would we have suppressed this result?
Yes, I agree with you. We discussed this topic on our Amsterdam video. We want to know how to deal with human hypothermia, which is why Mengele froze Jews to death in tanks of ice water. The question is important but the treatment was unethical. So, as you say, if there are questions that cannot be answered without unethical treatment, then those should be taboo.
The questions still hinge on what is considered ethical and unethical, and the answers to that might be based on ideological reasons that have little or nothing to do with actual harm to any human, but might involve “harm” to the ideology.
Germline genetic engineering is considered unethical by some people even if it strictly targeted toward an inherited disease and there are no expectations of harm to the future person.
(Similar issues surround GMO research in agriculture.)
I follow the Sunday cartoon blog of Bizarro (Dan Piraro).
(Dan usually creates cartoons for Sunday, while his Bizarro artist partner “Waymo” — not his wife — usually creates cartoons for the rest of the week.)
Yesterday Dan published his normal (funny) Sunday blog, with both his Sunday cartoons and Waymo’s weekday cartoons. This time, however, Dan also linked to another blog of his that is usually available only to paid subscribers but was free yesterday:
https://www.bizarro.com/blog/2024/6/8/a-conversation-with-my-they
In his linked blog (above) Dan explains how he was surprised to learn recently that one of his two daughters now identifies as “they” and “them.” He describes his reaction, which is all about acceptance of sexual orientation and gender expression.
But nothing was said by him or his readers about the reality of reproductive (binary) sex, so I added a comment. Since comments on Dan’s blog are moderated, I wasn’t sure if he would allow my comment. But I see today that he did allow it. Good for him, as I’m pretty sure some of his readers or fans might find my brief comment about binary sex objectionable.
Dan’s normal Sunday Bizarro blog is titled “Sibling Quibbling,” with a funny cartoon about Moses & Noah on the Ark:
https://www.bizarro.com/blog/2024/6/9/sibling-quibbling
I find this whole “they” business bizarre, but I’m old. My niece has a daughter going by “they” and doesn’t mind.
I don’t know exactly why, but when I was a New York City teenager in the Paleolithic Era, I was already often using “they” as it’s used now. But it remains a problem when trying to distinguish between one person and more than one person. In any case, I’ve certainly not completely banished “she” “he” “her” or “his” (et cetera) from my vocabulary. I just try to think about what seems appropriate in the context.
I can’t get used to it. I once decided against buying a book about someone who went by “they.” I couldn’t deal with a whole book of it. I find it confusing.
It often is confusing, Frau Katze — especially if one is trying to follow characters in a book.
There are a few aspects about this whole “they”/ “nonbinary” thing that bother me. I think that the sex binary is engrained deeply in our psychology – especially in how we view and act towards others. It usually only takes a split second to identify if someone is male or female, and it happens automatically… but there’s no built-in category for “neutral” or “neither”. We have conventions for talking to men and women – what levels of bluntness, flirtiness, emotionaliy, humor are accepted -but how am I supposed to talk to a “nonbinary”?
So when Piraro’s daughter proclaims she’s now a “they” because she’s unhappy with societal expectations, she’s offloading her burden onto everyone around her. The others cannot go by what their eyes tell them (namely, that she’s a woman), but by what she tells them about her current mental state, and they have to figure out how to treat this patricular person so she doesn’t feel excessively treated like a woman. How about, if she’s unhappy with societal expectations, she just doesn’t follow them? Wasn’t that the point of feminism 60 years ago – just because you’re a woman, you can still have a masculine temperament and do masculine things if you want?
Richard, that’s been my thinking about this as well. Feminism said that women could be in positions and act in non-traditional ways and still be accepted as female, and men could also act in non-traditional ways and still be accepted as men. The stereotypes associated with men and women were supposed to be torn down. Now, if a woman acts in a manly way, she must “actually” be male. Men who have a more feminine side jump into stereotypical female behavior and call themselves women. To your point about feminism, I remember how long haired guys were ridiculed by being called girls.
The Bob Seger song Turn The Page even has a line about Bob, as a long haired rocker, being stared at walking into a , with the line “All the same old clichés, “Is it woman, is it man?””, which was an insult then. Now, it would be seen as acceptance!
“Now, if a woman acts in a manly way, she must “actually” be male. Men who have a more feminine side jump into stereotypical female behavior and call themselves women.”
I don’t think that is an accurate characterization of the phenomenon of subjective gender identity — the gender one ‘feels’ one is. One of the common criticisms of Butler’s “gender performance” notion, for example, is that it conflates the performance of gender with the felt experience of gender. My female students wear pants but do not feel “male.”
How do you know they don’t, Barbara, unless they tell you by publishing their female pronouns? A female student in pants might well (for all anyone can know) be transitioning but not fully out enough to demand male, plural/indefinite, or invented pronouns. Some surely do, though: the ones with beards and mastectomy scars are clearly invested in it. But only a minority of trans and non-binary women who answer surveys are taking testosterone in doses sufficient to masculinize themselves. (Micro-dosing is a thing.). You might have more apparently female students “feeling” male than you can know, whether they wear pants or not.
Anyone of either sex can avail him/herself (by self-affirming) of the rights specially available to gender minorities. The woman not wearing pants can still “feel” male (and the man not wearing a dress and makeup could still “feel” female.). In “trans rights” regimes, gender expression is legally protected in and of itself but is not itself necessary to buttress a separate claim of gender identity. (No evidence at all is necessary.)
That said, stereotypical clothing and mannerisms (“expression” or “gender performance”) are useful clues that the person expects others to see him/her as not the sex he/she obviously is. A name tag with pronouns on it suffices equally for the enforcement process, though, as does an oral rebuke for misgendering one’s hidden “feelings.”
An asymmetry lies in the special rights available only to women in accommodation. Men gain them legally by identifying as women even though they can’t “pass”. (This is what “trans rights” really boils down to.). Women can more easily pass because beards are such a strong male display even on wispy men. Yet while men are envied for having more power in society, a woman who transitions to male appearance doesn’t gain any of that power for herself because she doesn’t have, and can never achieve, those attributes of maleness that give men their power irrespective of any rights framework: aggressiveness backed up by physical strength and the ability to rape.
Reply to Leslie MacMillan….
“How do you know they don’t, Barbara…”
Well, since 100% of my female students wear pants, at least sometimes, I think I’m on safe ground. My original point remains: your original comment conflated performance with subjectivity, and that doesn’t work with transgendered people. Performance and subjectivity are two different things. They may be congruent; they may conflict; but they are not the same.
The correlations may be “statistically significant” but given the huge scatter in the data not that important compared to other factors. The data is downloadable, and I had a quick play with the sex binary one. The Rsquared for that is around 0.1, and the standard deviation of the residuals is around 33%, indicating that the degree of belief may not be a major factor in reluctance to speak out.