These are not just data points, but actual human beings.  One human being discriminated against is one human being we could serve better, even if the vast majority of under-representation is due to self-selection.

Ravi exemplifies the compassion and open-mindedness of liberalism at its best. (In fact, his name was the 4th hit in my Google search for “liberal social psychologist”). In an effort to appeal to compassion from others, I have gathered here selections from the dozens of emails I’ve received in the weeks since my talk was publicized. My talk included the phrase “Closeted Conservatives.”  I made no effort to solicit such reports, and I have received no emails from conservatives who deny that they have faced difficulties because of their political identity. I have edited these reports only to shorten them. I obtained permission from all of the writers to post their words anonymously. All are graduate students or faculty in the social sciences, mostly in social psychology.

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As a closet conservative minority I read the transcript of your talk with great interest and gratitude…  Everything you describe fits my experience perfectly.  As a well liked minority, I experience what you describe even more intensely.  My career is beginning to take off, and I find myself needing to hold my tongue more than ever.  I am travelling and publishing, started my Ph.D. at an elite university… but I find myself hiding my intellectual views and values every single day…. Like everyone else you have heard from I prefer anonymity for my own survival.

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I can’t begin to tell you how difficult it was for me in graduate school, because I am not a liberal Democrat. As one example, following Bush’s defeat of Kerry, one of my professors would email me every time a soldier’s death in Iraq made the headlines; he would call me out, publicly blaming me for not supporting Kerry in the election.

I was a reasonably successful graduate student, but the political ecology became too uncomfortable for me. Instead of seeking the professorship that I once worked toward, I am now leaving academia for a job in industry. Universities boast about actively seeking to ever-increase the numbers of under-represented minorities in their ranks. Although, as a fiscal conservative, I have found my minority political beliefs abjectly unwelcome. While articles in my college alumni magazine celebrate the wonderful diversity and universal acceptation present on campus, they fail to mention the one exception: those whose political beliefs are not in lock-step with theirs.

I hope that a community of scientists would welcome a debate of ideas. Isn’t that how we learn and move forward our respective fields? Since when are academics so afraid of a dissenting opinion? If the political climate inside the graduate school is only comfortable to liberal Democrats, then only liberal Democrats will remain. This is not only in Berkeley and Madison, this is in many of our universities…  Hopefully, looking forward, your efforts will make room for someone whose views are in the minority to remain an academic and not leave for more accepting pastures.

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I am a conservative social psychologist. I would describe myself as socially moderately liberal but very fiscally conservative. My research focuses on the malleability of stereotyping and prejudice.  I can also attest to the “hostile environment” when one is a conservative amongst the many liberal social psychologists.  While in graduate school, I was one of two conservatives within the whole psychology department.  Thus, that is when I quickly learned to avoid political discussions and to keep my opinions to myself.  For instance, I once had a professor yell at me and refuse to speak to me for two days all because I was respectfully critical of a political speech that he loved.  For this reason, I have actually counseled some of my past undergraduate students about how to better deal with being a conservative in academia!

I have often tried to respectfully disagree or debate with some of my very liberal social colleagues without much success.  I’ve often been told that as a social psychologist I should “know better” or that they are “disappointed” in me for holding an opinion that differed from theirs. The whole situation is one that continuously frustrates me as I strongly believe that the ability to avoid emotional moral reasoning is one of the biggest principles towards critical thinking.  That point, however, seems to be ignored time and time again.  Still, I refuse to quit.  After all, I would hope that the abundant research on stereotypes, prejudice, and intergroup relations would help social psychologists carefully evaluate their own stereotypes and biases that they hold against conservatives.

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As a student at ________University (in the UK) I read with interest an article about your latest research relating to bias among academics. I completely agree, and I share the sentiments expressed by your students who are ‘in the closet’. I am one of them. In England, where cuts to Higher Education are framed by those on the left as being ideologically driven, the currency of liberal rhetoric is becoming increasingly valued. Those who support measures to increase student fees, typically those of the right such as me (I am a fiscal conservative but a social liberal), cannot confidently or even legitimately speak up. I remember one former professor, who is a member of the Conservative Party in the UK, told me that students and colleagues have such an ill-conceived idea of centre-right politics that he might as well be a member of the SS since anything which isn’t left-wing is so poorly regarded by the majority. It is my opinion that the dominance of left-wing opinion drowns out those with an alternative view, and institutions which should be fostering intellectual debates about the future of our country are in fact creating an intellectual vacuum. It is interesting that your findings, in my opinion at least, are not confined to a single country but can be found in higher education institutions across the Pond. I think it is a shame: we are less enriched because of it.

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I’ve got a Ph.D. in Experimental Psych – emphasis in Social. But I don’t do much in Social psychology any more. I’m sure the reasons are multiple and varied – but I believe one of them is the lack of comfort I feel around my social psych colleagues. I’m an evangelical Christian. I don’t know if “conservative” is the best label or not, perhaps libertarian would be better. I’m certainly liberal in many ways as well. But as I reflect on where my sense of discomfort comes from I would probably most directly finger the implied belief that I perceive most of my colleagues hold – and that is a belief in the inability that a person of faith could be a real scientist, ostensibly because they would not be able to “tolerate” that truth, so to speak. This notion that there is an inherent conflict between a Christian worldview and a pursuit for truth is so pronounced that it makes it very hard to even bother with trying to combat it.

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I’m currently a Ph.D. student in a department of sociology…  I’m actually quite liberal on both social and fiscal issues.  Prior to enrolling in the sociology Ph.D. program I served as a police officer in a large city.  But, after only a few weeks in graduate school, I began to hide this fact from others and never spoke about it openly.  Colleagues were looking at me and interacting with me differently than other students.  I finally realized that I was being “labeled” a conservative before people had even spoken to me.  It was astonishing: even being LABELED conservative, regardless of whether I actually was conservative or not, had become detrimental to my experience in the department.  I presume this label was applied to me since many police officers are very conservative.  However, I had become the victim of the very type of negative labeling that these academics would pride themselves on trying to fight…

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I am a conservative, and like the students you mentioned, I felt very frustrated during my time in grad school. All of the faculty members were liberal, and they constantly made political jokes and comments, assuming that we all shared their ideology… I had originally wanted to do my dissertation on an ideological topic, but my advisor kind of steered me away from that. …

This specific issue affected me so much during my graduate school years, that it actually steered me away from research, and I took a teaching position at a local community college after graduation. Of course, I now see the same exact situation at my community college. It seems that “everyone” (including my department head and dean) is very socially liberal, and the other faculty constantly make fun of conservatives and bad-mouth them, assuming that I am a liberal–like everyone else! I do feel that even at the community college level, I must keep my views to myself or risk being discriminated against.

I do think (in fact I KNOW) that conservatives can bring an important alternative voice to the science of psychology. I have seen many instances of bias in the research that is being done, and in the interpretation of specific findings (although researchers can be blind to this phenomenon because of their ideology!) I do believe that in order to further social psychology as a science, this alternative and critical voice that is missing must eventually be heard. I wanted to write you to let you know that by speaking up, you are providing a voice for individuals like me (who have felt excluded for a very long time)!

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Whatever the reason for the underrepresentation of conservatives in social psychology, and in the social sciences more generally, the near-total absence of conservatives has allowed a tribal moral community to develop in many fields. Those who don’t share the same sacred values must either hide, leave, or live stigmatized lives with stunted career prospects. These are real people. We should do what we can to break up the moral force field and welcome them in.

I posted a response on his blog, but because my response was #287 out of 310, nobody is likely to see it. I reprint it here:

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Dear Mr. Krugman:
I urge you to view the video and/or transcript of my talk at www.JonathanHaidt.com.
I very deliberately did NOT make the moral argument that ideological divides are like racial divides. I agree with you that there are many relevant differences. Also, I directly stated that personality differences will always guarantee that academe is mostly liberal, just as you noted that the military is mostly conservative. That’s all fine by me.
Rather, I focused my appeal to my colleagues one one point: that when conservatives are entirely absent (as opposed to simply underrepresented), then there is NOBODY to speak up, nobody to challenge predominant ideas, and our science suffers. I gave examples of several scientific mistakes that my fellow social psychologists make because our shared values make it difficult for us to entertain alternative hypotheses. People who think of such alternatives dare not speak up.
My research, like so much research in social psychology, demonstrates that we humans are experts at using reasoning to find evidence for whatever conclusions we want to reach. We are terrible at searching for contradictory evidence. Science works because our peers are so darn good at finding that contradictory evidence for us. Social science — at least my corner of it — is broken because there is nobody to look for contradictory evidence regarding sacralized issues, particularly those related to race, gender, and class. I urged my colleagues to increase our ideological diversity not for any moral reason, but because it will make us better scientists. You do not have that problem in economics where the majority is liberal but there is a substantial and vocal minority of libertarians and conservatives. Your field is healthy, mine is not.
Do you think I was wrong to call for my professional organization to seek out a modicum of ideological diversity?

Jonathan Haidt

Normally, we look at our yourmorals.org data in terms of liberals and conservatives, but what can we say about moderates.  In many instances (e.g. Measures of general moral or political positions using Moral Foundations or Schwartz Values), moderates score between liberals and conservatives.  However, there are a couple interesting findings about moderates in our data that might be of interest.

First, moderates are less engaged in politics.  This isn’t a particularly controversial finding as research in social psychology shows that extreme attitudes are more resistant to change and more likely to predict behavior.  Moderates are defined by their lack of extremity and this lack of extremity predicts a disinterest in politics and lack of desire to engage in political action.

As such, it is not surprising that, as Stewart notes, the only voices which often get heard are the loudest voices.  Shouting hurts your throat and moderates are unwilling to pay that price.  But couched in terms of entertainment and comedy?  Maybe that will spur moderates to attend in a way that an overtly political/partisan event could never do.

Going a bit deeper, the other area where moderates score differently than liberals and conservatives is in terms of their willingness to moralize issues.  Moderates are less likely to frame issues as moral and less likely to be moral maximizers. Morality can be a great force for good, but there is also research on idealistic evil and the dark side of moral conviction.  You’ll notice that while liberals and conservatives moralize individual issues in the below graph at different levels, the extremes generally moralize issues more than moderates or less extreme partisans.  It’s worth noting I recently attended a talk by Linda Skitka where her team found (in China) that high moralization scores predict willingness to spy on and censor people with opposing viewpoints.

Moderates also score lower on a general (not issue specific) measure of moral maximizing.  Below is a graph of scores on individual moral maximizing questions.  Again, a lot of good may be done in the name of morality and moral maximizers may be less willing to let people starve or let injustice stand.  However, a lot of bad may be done in the name of morality as well and “never settling” for imperfect moral outcomes seems like a recipe for the kind of political ugliness that we see these days.  Moderates appear willing to accept imperfection in the moral realm.

Maximizing is a concept made popular by Barry Schwartz at Swarthmore in his book, the Paradox of Choice and his TED talk.  The argument isn’t that high standards are a bad thing…but that at some point, there is a level where overly high standards have negative consequences.  The point that Stewart and Colbert are making is that perhaps partisans have reached that point in our political dialogue, to the detriment of policy.

I probably won’t make it to DC, but I do plan on celebrating the Rally to Restore Sanity in some way, perhaps at a satellite event.  I am generally liberal and will be surrounded mainly (though not exclusively) by liberal friends.  It would be really easy to use the event as a time to mock and denigrate the extremity of the other side.  However, liberal moral absolutism has it’s dangers too.  For those of us who really want to restore sanity to political debate, it is an opportunity to be the change we want to see in the world and take a moment to reflect on how our political side can ‘take it down a notch for America’, rather than assuming that Stewart is talking to ‘them’.  And perhaps that begins with accepting some amount of moral imperfection.

- Ravi Iyer

Libertarians believe in the importance of individual liberty, a belief that may be related to lower levels of agreeableness and higher scores on a measure of psychological reactance (e.g. “regulations trigger a sense of resistance in me”).  They moralize concerns about harm less than liberals, in part because they have lower levels of empathy .  They moralize principles concerning being a group member (obeying authority and being loyal) less than conservatives in part because they have less attachment to the groups around them.

If you want to read more about what the paper, says, you can click here or download the paper here, but right now, I’d like to focus on why we wrote the paper, as I have previously written about how people are attracted to why you write things as much as what you write.

Of course, some part of paper writing is driven by curiosity and the practical desire to publish.  But in writing this paper, I have undergone my own personal intellectual journey, and I’m hopeful that others may have a similar experience. A lot of my impression of libertarianism was previously shaped by images of the Tea Party (who aren’t necessarily libertarians after all) and I thought of libertarians as uncaring, from my liberal perspective, in that they typically don’t support progressive taxes and social programs. The original title of the paper was “the Search for Libertarian Morality”, implying that libertarians are potentially amoral, and in retrospect showing my own ideological bias.

But as I read more about libertarian philosophy and looked more carefully at the data, I found that libertarians do indeed have a coherent moral code, that simply differs from my own. Like my liberal leanings, which have some relation to my dispositions and preferences, libertarians also moralize their preferences and dispositions, in ways that mirror my own processes. For example, liberals and libertarians both score high on desire for new experiences and stimulation, which may be a common reason why both groups tend to emphasize individual choice over group solidarity, compared to conservatives, as cohesive groups can limit choice.  Libertarians may be less moved by emotions such as disgust and empathy, which may lead them to moralize certain situations less than others.  But who am I to say that my moral compass is any better or worse than theirs, given my view that at some level, the basis for my liberal moral compass is driven by subjective sentiment.  I previously wrote about the dangers of liberal moral absolutism, and villainizing libertarians for not sharing my particular vision of morality would be a step down that road.

Why do we seek to publicize this paper?  In a time when partisanship dominates, policy suffers,  and people on both sides of the aisle villainize the other side, it is our hope that with greater understanding comes greater acceptance. We may not all agree about the relative merits of empathy, disgust, or reactance as moral emotions…but we all have some level of all of these emotions and can respect principles born out of these.  Even liberals can find things so disgusting that they are seen as wrong, and conservatives actually give a lot of money to the poor.  In attributing moral disagreements to dispositions, largely out of our control, perhaps we can learn to see others as different and attracted to other positive moral principles, rather than amoral and oblivious to the moral principles that are important to us.

- Ravi Iyer

…there are two big incentives that drive behavior at the intersection where politics meets media. One is public attention. The other is money. Experience shows there’s lots more of both to be had by engaging in extreme partisan behavior.

Fox News has soared on the strength of commentators like Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, both of whom fanned the Sherrod story on the strength of the misleading Breitbart video. (A Fox senior executive, by contrast, urged the news side of the operation to get Sherrod’s response before going with the story, The Washington Post reported.) On the left, MSNBC is trying to emulate the success of primetime partisanship. Meanwhile, CNN, which has largely strived toward a neutral ideological posture, is battling steady relative declines in its audience.

If media executives hunger for ratings, politicians hunger for campaign cash and fame.

Obama put it best earlier this year, after Republican Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina shouted “you lie” during the president’s State of the Union speech. “The easiest way to get on television right now is to be really rude,” the president told ABC News.

Indeed, at first Wilson seemed embarrassed and apologized for his outburst. But within days, Wilson and his opponent were both flooded with campaign contributions; Wilson took in more than $700,000 in the immediate aftermath of his outburst and was a guest of honor on Hannity’s show and Fox News Sunday.

We reward politicians and news organizations, with our attention and our money, that engage in the very incivility that makes politics so ugly. This is true on both sides of the aisle.

At the recent meeting of the International Society of Political Psychology, Linda Skitka gave a talk which puts a lot of this in perspective for me. Her lab studies the dark side of moral conviction, which I call hypermoralism in the hope that the term catches on. Roy Baumeister studies a similar concept, idealistic evil. In Skitka’s talk, she demonstrates in a Chinese sample that political intolerance (e.g. “people with different positions than your own about this issue should be allowed to have their phones tapped by the Chinese government”) and social intolerance (e.g. “How willing would you be to have someone who did not share your views on this issue as a close personal friend?”) were best predicted by moral conviction (e.g. “To what extent are your feelings about this issue or policy based on your fundamental beliefs about right and wrong?”).  When controlling for moral conviction, all other variables (e.g. demographics, political position, attitude importance, and attitude strength) were all insignificant predictors of social and political intolerance. I look forward to seeing how this replicates on a US sample and how political intolerance is operationalized. Perhaps something along the lines of liberal consideration of censoring Fox news or conservative publication of what many would consider private discussion would make good operationalizations of political intolerance as they mirror what we see in reality, where considerations of privacy, context, and free speech are considered secondary to partisanship. Moral conviction may underlie the hyperpartisanship that Politico talks about.

Hyperpartisanship and hypermoralism may be another instance of the effects of what evolutionary psychologist Deirdre Barrett calls “Supernormal Stimuli”. As the Wall Street Journal writes about her book:

As Ms. Barrett notes, modern life surrounds us with supernormal stimuli. An example: Humans evolved strong tastes for fats and sweets, tastes that conferred a reproductive advantage in the days when starvation was common. But these tastes can be a burden when we’re confronted with such supernormal stimuli as the 400-calorie Frappuccino at Starbucks. An evolutionary adaptation that once promised survival is more likely nowadays to produce Type 2 diabetes.

Ms. Barrett pushes her thesis too far at times, but her plain-spoken disquisition makes a strong case that supernormal stimuli “can help us understand the problems of modern civilization.”

One might even argue that supernormal stimuli—or perhaps our reactions to them—are the biggest problems faced by affluent societies.

In the case of hyperpartisanship and hypermoralism, our evolved moral senses, which allow human beings to cooperate, are now subject to the stimulus which is the 24 hour news cycle and the non-stop political campaign. Moral emotions are powerful forces, which are now activated routinely, rather than rarely.

If anybody has ideas on how to escape this cycle, I would love to hear them. Humanizing and getting to know the opposition, along the lines of intergroup contact theory, is an idea. Perhaps moral emotions can be activated against hyperpartisanship itself, rather than against individual ideologies. Or maybe with greater understanding, we can all learn to recognize supernormal moral stimuli and give them less power in our lives. Ideas welcome and I’m open to operationalizing particularly promising ideas as studies to be run on yourmorals.org.

- Ravi Iyer

On Journolist, there was rarely such thing as an honorable political disagreement between the left and right, though there were many disagreements on the left. In the view of many who’ve posted to the list-serv, conservatives aren’t simply wrong, they are evil. And while journalists are trained never to presume motive, Journolist members tend to assume that the other side is acting out of the darkest and most dishonorable motives.

Reading other people’s private emails evokes an embodied moral reaction in me. Maybe it’s motivated reasoning as a liberal myself, but I would hope that I’d find it similarly distasteful for a business to make money by posting the private emails of conservatives. Still, I think that the above paragraph is likely correct for some (not all) members of the list, along the lines of this wonderful post by Peter Ditto of UC-Irvine, concerning the ways that liberals and conservatives mirror each other in their negative attributions.  In it, he notes that a “mirror image pattern, two opposing sides in an ideological struggle having virtually identical stereotypes of each other, is a common characteristic in intergroup relations.” The idea is that when you find these mirror image perceptions, they are often more a function of partisanship and group conflict than reality.

It’s not hard to find quotes from conservatives that mirror the above observation of journolist members.  Consider this article entitled “Why does Obama hate America so badly?” My guess is that Democrats don’t hate the economy and Republicans don’t hate poor people, yet these mirror image negative attributions of malicious intent exist.

Here is the same story in graph form, using our yourmorals.org data, where liberals and conservatives rate both republicans and democrats on “warmth”…

and on “competence”….

Hardly surprising, but liberals think Republicans are cold and incompetent, while conservatives think Democrats are cold and incompetent.  (strangely, we generally think that we ourselves are both more warm and more competent than the average member of either party..:))

I’m sure that cherry picking any person’s email archive would lead to embarrassing material, but I would agree with Andrew Sullivan’s take on JournoList:

The far right is right on this: this collusion is corruption. It is no less corrupt than the comically propagandistic Fox News and the lock-step orthodoxy on the partisan right in journalism – but it is nonetheless corrupt…….

…..I’m glad Journo-list is over. It should never have been begun. I know many of its members are good and decent and fair-minded writers. But socialized groupthink is not the answer to what’s wrong with the media. It’s what’s already wrong with the media.

These mirror image negative perceptions are an inevitable part of intergroup conflict, so rather than morally judging the individuals involved for behavior that is likely quite common, I prefer to take this as a cautionary tale for all who want better policy. On both sides of the aisle, we should be seeking to recognize and reduce these biases, not amplify them through ideologically homogeneous discussions, such as what appeared to occur on JournoList.

- Ravi Iyer