One of the most odious forms of censorship in modern science. or in any discipline that produces empirical results, is to simply ignore the results of or even refuse to publish a study simply because it gives results you—or a journal or a newspaper—don’t like because they go against current ideology.
We’ve seen this before when Johanna Olson-Kennedy’s multi-year, federally funded study on the effects of puberty blockers was held back by the authors from publication because it didn’t give the results that the authors wanted. Instead of blockers increasing the mental well-being of children in a two-year study, there were no palpable improvements (I don’t know if there was a control group as the study hasn’t been published). As the New York Times reported:
In the nine years since the study was funded by the National Institutes of Health, and as medical care for this small group of adolescents became a searing issue in American politics, Dr. Olson-Kennedy’s team has not published the data. Asked why, she said the findings might fuel the kind of political attacks that have led to bans of the youth gender treatments in more than 20 states, one of which will soon be considered by the Supreme Court.
“I do not want our work to be weaponized,” she said. “It has to be exactly on point, clear and concise. And that takes time.”
How duplicitous and craven can you get? And given that it was taxpayer money that funded this study, don’t we (or the NIH) have the right to demand that it be published? Of course Olson-Kennedy had an excuse: she said that no improvements were seen because the kids were “in really good shape when they came in.” But earlier she had reported that one-quarter of the same group was depressed or suicidal when the study began! Something is fishy, and I think it’s the odor of mendacity. Publish the study and let us see for ourselves!
Now we have another case, with two media organizations—this time including the NYT—ignoring a study on the inimical (yes, inimical) effects of DEI training on intergroup harmony. Both articles are from late last year.
The first article below, from Lee Jussim’s “Unsafe Science” Substack site (click headline), is really a repost of something written by Colin Wright for his own Substack site. Lee planned to write something on this study but, as he says below, he deferred to Colin (second headline, click to read):
From Lee:
This post was written by Colin Wright and originally appeared at his Substack site, Reality’s Last Stand. It is on our research on the negative consequences of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion pedagogy and rhetoric based on ideas promoted by Ibram Kendi and Robin DiAngelo (whose work was quoted exactly in our experimental manipulations). I was planning to do a post on this, but his was so good, I had little to add. Lee
. . . and an excerpt from Colin’s original. As you can see from what’s below, the study was shelved by two organizations, certainly because it didn’t show that DEI training increased “inclusion”.
From Colin’s piece (bolding about the craven behavior is mine):
In a stunning series of events, two leading media organizations—The New York Times and Bloomberg—abruptly shelved coverage of a groundbreaking study that raises serious concerns about the psychological impacts of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) pedagogy. The study, conducted by the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) in collaboration with Rutgers University, found that certain DEI practices could induce hostility, increase authoritarian tendencies, and foster agreement with extreme rhetoric. With billions of dollars invested annually in these initiatives, the public has a right to know if such programs—heralded as effective moral solutions to bigotry and hate—might instead be fueling the very problems they claim to solve. The decision to withhold coverage raises serious questions about transparency, editorial independence, and the growing influence of ideological biases in the media.
The NCRI study investigated the psychological effects of DEI pedagogy, specifically training programs that draw heavily from texts like Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist and Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility. The findings were unsettling, though perhaps not surprising to longstanding opponents of such programs. Through carefully controlled experiments, the researchers demonstrated that exposure to anti-oppressive (i.e., anti-racist) rhetoric—common in many DEI initiatives—consistently amplified perceptions of bias where none existed. Participants were more likely to see prejudice in neutral scenarios and to support punitive actions against imagined offenders. These effects were not marginal; hostility and punitive tendencies increased by double-digit percentages across multiple measures. Perhaps most troubling, the study revealed a chilling convergence with authoritarian attitudes, suggesting that such training is fostering not empathy, but coercion and control.
The implications of these findings cannot be downplayed. DEI programs have become a fixture in workplaces, schools, and universities across the United States, with a 2023 Pew Research Center report indicating that more than half of U.S. workers have attended some form of DEI training. Institutions collectively spend approximately $8 billion annually on these initiatives, yet the NCRI study underscores how little scrutiny they receive. While proponents of DEI argue that these programs are essential to achieving equity and dismantling systemic oppression, the NCRI’s data suggests that such efforts may actually be deepening divisions and cultivating hostility.
This context makes the suppression of the study even more alarming. The New York Times, which has cited NCRI’s work in nearly 20 previous articles, suddenly demanded that this particular research undergo peer review—a requirement that had never been imposed on the institute’s earlier findings, even on similarly sensitive topics like extremism or online hate. At Bloomberg, the story was quashed outright by an editor known for public support of DEI initiatives. The editorial decisions were ostensibly justified as routine discretion, yet they align conspicuously with the ideological leanings of those involved. Are these major outlets succumbing to pressures to protect certain narratives at the expense of truth?
You can see the study below (click to read it); I’ve quoted the first page with a précis of the methods and results. Note that this study did have a random control—the usual method where one group reads material designed to produce the desired results (in this case by Ibram Kendi and Robin DiAngelo) while the control group reads “neutral” material. Any sources of the funding are not given the relatively short (23-page) report, so I don’t know if it was done using taxpayer money. The text has plenty of bar graphs that tell the tale (I won’t include them here).
They don’t pull any punches with the title.
Here’s the summary; bolding in the last paragraph is mine. The total sample was 423 undergraduates
Given both the lack of rigorous research on diversity initiatives and the documented potential of DEI efforts backfiring, a better assessment of the efficacy and effects of contemporary diversity training is warranted.
This study focused on diversity training interventions that emphasize awareness of and opposition to “systemic oppression,” a trend fueled by the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement and popularized by texts such as Ibram X. Kendi’s, How to Be an Antiracist. 10 While not representative of all DEI pedagogy, “anti-racism” and “anti-oppression” pedagogy and intervention materials have seen widespread adoption across sectors like higher education and healthcare. Yet this pedagogy lacks rigorous evaluation of effectiveness, particularly with respect to reducing bias and improving interpersonal/inter-group dynamics.
The prominent “anti-oppressive pedagogy” in DEI programming can carry perceived rhetorical threats for those whose politics or other beliefs run counter to the fundamental premises of the critical paradigm from which the pedagogy derives. Programming may reflexively cast members of so-called “dominant” groups or those who disagree with “anti-oppressive,” “anti-racist,” or modern-day “anti-fascist” framings as oppressive, racist, or fascist.
The studies reported herein assess a crucial question: Do ideas and rhetoric foundational to many DEI trainings foster pluralistic inclusiveness, or do they exacerbate intergroup and interpersonal conflicts? Do they increase empathy and understanding or increase hostility towards members of groups labeled as oppressors?
Across three groupings—race, religion, and caste—NCRI collected anti-oppressive DEI educational materials frequently used in interventional and educational settings. The religion-focused interventions drew on content from the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (ISPU), commonly used in sensitivity training on Islamophobia. For race, materials featured excerpts from DEI scholars like Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. Caste interventions featured anti-oppression narratives from Equality Labs, one of the most prolific training providers for caste discrimination in North America.
Rhetoric from these materials was excerpted and administered in psychological surveys measuring explicit bias, social distancing, demonization, and authoritarian tendencies. Participants were randomly assigned to review these materials or neutral control material. Their responses to this material was assessed through various questions assessing intergroup hostility and authoritarianism, and through scenario-based questions (details on all demographic data, survey questions, essay conditions, responses and analyses can be found in a supplementary document to this report).
Across all groupings, instead of reducing bias, they engendered a hostile attribution bias (Epps & Kendall, 1995), amplifying perceptions of prejudicial hostility where none was present 11 , and punitive responses to the imaginary prejudice. These results highlight the complex and often counterproductive impacts of pedagogical elements and themes prevalent in mainstream DEI training.
One addition from the study:
It is beyond the scope of this research to evaluate DEI training writ large and our work therefore, should not be taken as evaluating the efficacy of an entire industry.
Yes, that caveat almost a given. But this isn’t the first study to show that DEI training doesn’t do what it purports to do. But this one is a fairly comprehensive study, and any discussion of the efficacy of DEI training should take its results into account. Pity that the NYT or Bloomberg ignored it.
Thank you for bringing this to our attention, I really appreciate the information.
Me too!
Ditto — had not come across this.
Thanks for this write-up.
Please remember Richard Bilkszto
One would hope this is settled??? How many people need to commit suicide after being subjected to this bullshit crap
https://www.richardbilkszto.com/
Even if all of the science is itself published transparently and completely—including negative results and raw data—there still remains the matter of how the press will cover it. It’s rich that the New York Times suddenly demands that the NCRI research described above be subject to peer review. Was the content in Kendi’s book, How to be an Antiracist, subject to the same scrutiny?
Seems to me the obvious; they refuse to publish anything about the study because it’s sacrilegious.
EDWARDM, that would be a good bingo. 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼
Good description.
I’ve been through many DEI workshops as part of my employment. It was obvious to me after the first one that this was counterproductive to enhancing teamwork and open communication, and further trainings reinforced that view. Before the trainings, we were from multiple backgrounds and different skin colors but working toward a common goal. During the training we were told that certain skin colors or ancestry needed to be recognized as being cultural victims and thus held to different (lower) standards while others (white men) oppressed others as part of their cultural DNA.
A black engineer who I’m good friends with told the instructor (a black female) that he held himself to a higher standard than being a downtrodden victim who shouldn’t be expected to be on time to work or to turn in accurate work, as he prided himself on his work ethic and quality of results. He was told to release his “whiteness” and accept his true ethnicity. He became a bit angry, called the training BS, and sat steaming through the rest of the session. Afterwards, one of our young white female HR staff, a recent grad from a liberal Big 10 school, tried to comfort him with the words “I recognize your emotions as part of your culture, and want you to know that we see you as who you are. It’s OK to be different from those who only seek to oppress you” or something really close to that. She basically turned him into the Angry Black Man trope in the name of DEI empowerment.
Other training highlights over the past couple years included the time they made a gay man cry in front of the group during a session, singling out Mexican-American staff for being culturally lazy, telling white men that they need to perform less excellently, standing a woman up in front of the class and saying that her body shape is something she should be proud of (imagine how she felt with a room of mainly male engineers being told to stare at her body, and imagine how uncomfortable we felt being told to do it), and telling all minorities that certain things that are normal engineering terms are actually microagressions that should be reported to HR. Also that Jews are good with money, but they need to be watched. In my experience, DEI trainers use the worst stereotypes as the structure for their oppressed / oppressor hierarchy. It’s politically correct KKK indoctrination.
DEI has been a wrecking ball in our corporation. It’s turned HR into a power center, destroyed team dynamics, and wasted time and money. We have a VP for Diversity, who has two directors and a dozen staff. Easily $3 million in just salaries, not to mention travel to their workshops and other expenses, while we’re cutting jobs in other divisions (side comment: what DOGE is recommending is peanuts compared to normal operations in industry even in good times).
The only people who benefit from DEI are graduates from “studies” programs who are now able to monetize their non-talent.
Been there and done that, too. Incredible.
I’ve got more horror stories like that. It is a cancer in the company.
Oh, man. That is sick. It would be interesting to somehow track productivity before and after such spectacles.
Thank you for the article. Colin Wright is terrific.
Woke ideology has become quite “holier-than-thou” sinister and incapable of self-correction. Anyone who finds or conveys evidence that conflicts with the ideology is subject to DARVO – Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender.
There are a great variety of programs in various institutions that call themselves DEI. Without more info about a specific initiative that is labeled “DEI”, you don’t know if it is DEI lite or a full blown project of propaganda and bullying that would make the Soviet Communists proud. Some initiatives that call themselves DEI are harmless and mostly just attempt better outreach to potential minority employees and deal with workplace incidents as they occur. Others go the full nine yards and require what amount to loyalty oaths, subject employees to frequent lectures informing them that they are racist, however inadvertently, and that they constantly commit micro aggressions and blah and blah.
I have a friend whose workplace was subjected to the latter heavy duty kind of DEI. Not surprisingly, the effect on morale was terrible. People simply felt they were walking on eggshells. Nobody wanted to associate more than absolutely necessary with minority employees or women who looked like they might be touchy and imagine micro aggressions. The effect was to make the workplace socially segregated.
Sorry Mr. Cole, for my money ANY thought control in the workplace beyond “The fire exit is HERE, we use this stamp in this situation and don’t grope your co-workers” type bullet points is a disaster.
hhahah You should sit in on a real life DEI workplace lecture. Like your poor friend. I’ve “enjoyed” two in companies I helped finance years ago – just for curiosity. I was horrified both at the content of the “class” and the obvious near retardation and utter ignorance of the witchfinder “teacher”. Terrible.
I haven’t looked b/c masochism isn’t my thing but I bet there are examples on youtube of modules for DEI “instructors”.
best regards Mr. Cole,
D.A.
NYC
My point was that some organizations made a token nod to DEI by calling something DEI, but didn’t actually implement much of any DEI.
That DEI training is often, if not largely, either counter-productive or ineffective has been shown by studies going back at least a decade. So I would not call this study “groundbreaking”.
yes. Lee Jussim has lead the charge. About 2014-ish.
D.A
NYC
Robert Putnam of Harvard buried his own research for years because it showed that diversity had more negative effects than positive ones. This latest research on DEI makes me wonder if the uptick in radicalization of young white men — the “Red Pill” and “Alt Right” stuff — is at least partly due to the heavy DEI push that young people receive on college campuses.
One of the worst instances of unintended consequences (by Jon Kay @ Quillette).
https://quillette.com/2023/07/21/rip-richard-bilkszto/
A terrible story — I had learned of this previously, and thanks for posting the link. Every time I’m reminded of this atrocious defamation of a good person — I’m just so sad that he suicided. I was booted to the sidelines before DEI was widespread. One of the unexpected good consequences of a negative event in my life.
What was done to Bilkszto was heinous. Did anything ever happen to Kike Ojo-Thompson?
Kike Ojo-Thompson is doing fine.
Partner, Human Capital Consulting, Deloitte · Canada · on LinkedIn.
Of course not. This is Canada.
Apart from being wildly racist in and of themselves, DEI “trainings” – like the trans cult – are another version of magical thinking.
The perfect frame is that they’re new religions – which is probably why people like PCC(E) whose life work is fighting religion as well as atheists like myself and many readers here reject DEI and “anti-racism”.
Also.. like religious affiliation, they’re negatively corelated with IQ. So what we have in the non-god community is a split between those who believe in magical thinking and the atheists (me, PCCE,etc) who don’t need a bearded man and parchment documents to see religion and its nonsense in a current form. This split – at least I believe – happened about a decade ago within atheists starting with “Elevatorgate” – there’s the split and it got wider with trans – the latest unicorn genderwang religion.
Fight fiercely against all magical thinking.
D.A.
NYC
mine, a few years ago about religion:
https://democracychronicles.org/an-atheist-perspective-of-our-current-illnesses/
“Fight fiercely against all magical thinking.”
I agree.
It’s my opinion that the most fundamental form of magical thinking is belief in free will.
Free will requires the decoupling of rationality from underlying logic. This cannot happen. Rationality is an abstraction of underlying logic. It hides the underlying logic giving the impression that a self can simply pull rational thought out of thin air. This does not cause postmodern thinking but I believe that it does throw the door to it wide open.
With regards to Olson-Kennedy’s puberty blocker research, I doubt that there is a control group because the subjects would quickly realise that they were being given placebos once puberty started to kick in.
Yes, JzG. Psychedelic research runs into this problem quite a lot also.
It is hard to convince anybody they’ve taken LSD when they haven’t and impossible to tell somebody tripping they actually…. aren’t.
hehehhe. It is a hard to ignore set of reactions. Like puberty – people notice. 🙂
D.A.
NYC
(psychonaut and amateur psychedelic brain effects researcher)
I wonder if those who support DEI are less concerned about what the study revealed about the programs’ impact and more concerned about the general public reading about it and catching on that the “negative” findings were actually the goal.
Making people in the oppressor class feel uncomfortable and unwelcome — while simultaneously encouraging the oppressed to notice Microaggressions and bring them to the attention of authorities who can punish — is explicitly baked right into the materials which inspire the courses. An awkward, hostile workplace is presumably preferable to one which runs smoothly on white supremicist standards. The system itself is broken, and can never work.
So the most dangerous aspect of this study might be the way it assumes that an “effective solution to bigotry and hate” was and is DEI’s intended outcome. No wonder it needs to be suppressed. Not all the public has opened their eyes yet.
“An awkward, hostile workplace is presumably preferable to one which runs smoothly on white supremicist standards. The system itself is broken, and can never work.”
Good point. Making people in the oppressor class uncomfortable is I think what they mean by queering the system.
This is a subtle and creepy distinction. The whole point, then, is to upset the applecart. Its goal is not to “bring us around”, but to get us the hell out. This is a hard pill to swallow.
I think it would safe to conclude that aggressive DEI programs are inimical to trust and teamwork, the problems magnified if accompanied by assaults on meritocracy. If you walk down this road your organization is looking at significant trouble. Now, picture yourself working with people upon whom your life is dependent, doing a job that puts not only you in harm’s way but puts others in the path of harm that you can do. Where this DEI mentality has taken root, it must be cut out. Any cheerleaders and activists in the organization who enthusiastically forced it upon others must be removed for the good of the organization. That includes those who wear stars in the military. Even when it is Donald Trump who does the removing.
I am never much convinced by short studies using undergraduate students as the subjects. They are legal adults and a convient population for people conducting the studies. However the traditional undergraduate is fresh from High School and has not led an independent adult life. They are still emotionally adolescent in many cases. I am more interested in how these DEI trainings impact workers in office and other work settings. In that case, it is easy for me to be convinced that these can be divisive.
My non-experimental and empirically limited experiences suggest to me that the kind of DEI ideas studied by the NCRI do negatively impact the work environment for me and many of my colleagues in K-12 schools. For example, at a recent training, a building principal presented a slide that claimed, “interpersonal racism occurs when those with racial privilege (White people) discriminate against, isolate, minimize the experience of or oppress those with no (historical) structural power (People of Color).” After I raised my hand, the only hand to go up and challenge anything about the presentation and asked if that statement meant that someone who looked like me (white skin) could not experience interpersonal racism toward me, the principal stuttered a bit and then said, “We are only concerned with harm to BIPOC individuals today.” I let it go, seeing there was no interest in discussing it. I was later told that a woman in the group thought my question was ‘hostile’.
Sounds awful.
As someone in a field (plant physiology) where peer-review is coin of the realm, I have trouble getting too upset about a demand for it. Saying that is has not been demanded before is not a particularly strong argument. Also, saying that the study comes from NCRI and Rutgers somewhat elides the fact that NCRI is housed at Rutgers.
I read quickly through the study (I’m certainly not qualified to be a peer reviewer), and the lit. review had a strong scent of picked cherries. But that’s one reason for peer review.
Somebody, please, get us a peer-reviewed article so we know what to think, so we know what to do!
I wonder how military leaders built cohesive and effective units before they had academics to tell them how to do it. I wonder how diplomats and rulers ever orchestrated successful and grand undertakings before peer-reviewed psychology and sociology was there to explain human behavior. i wonder how poets, playwrights, and novelists illuminated the human condition without the last 100 years of institutional enlightenment.
But, by all means, let’s wait for a peer-reviewed study before we recognize the (predictable) damage that has been done.
The Rutgers study (and umpteen anecdotes like comments #5 and 7 above) shows that there are negative outcomes among the captive audiences of Diversity trainings. But exactly those outcomes—notional biases, imaginary offenses—supply grist for the mills of the DEI bureaucracies which conduct the trainings. So, the bureaucratic view of the Rutgers study should be: mission accomplished. Speaking of which, Matt Feeny at UnHerd, has a smart article on how academic bureaucrats made DIVERSITY into the chief divinity in the temple of Academia.