507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
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so the podcast today took a turn back to the psychological which is an improvement over the political as far as i'm concerned generally speaking um likely because the topic of concentration has more long-lasting significance, all things considered. So, in any case, I spoke today with Lee Jussom, and Lee is a distinguished professor of psychology at Rutgers, and he's been the chair there of the Department of Psychology, and separately of anthropology, which is a peculiar happenstance that we discuss in the podcast. I was interested in Lee's work because there's a lot of trouble in the field of social psychology. A lot of the claims of the field are not true. Now, you got to expect that in scientific inquiry because a lot of the things we believe are false and the whole reason that we practice as scientists is to correct those falsehoods. And it's also the case that
much of what's published is not going to be true because the alternative would be that everything that was published was a discovery that was true and we'd be overwhelmed by novelty so fast that it would be untenable if that ever happened. Lee is one of the rarer social psychologists who's actually a scientist and He's done a lot of interesting and also controversial work. That's partly how you can tell it's interesting and valid, because it also is controversial. One of the things he's established, which is of cardinal importance, is that our perceptions of other people are not mostly biased. Right? This is... The contrary claim is rather preposterous, which is that all of the categories that we use to structure our interactions with other people are based on the power distortion of our perceptions, let's say, which is essentially a... and postmodern claim. And Lee became infamous, at least in part, because he showed that our perceptions, our stereotypes, if you will, are mostly accurate.
There are sources of bias, and they do enter into the process, and they're relevant. But that's a very different claim than that the foundations of our perceptions themselves are indistinguishable from the biases we hold as motivated agents. And so... His work is extremely important. It's core to the culture war that is tearing us apart. So, if you're interested in the definition of perception, the relationship between perception and reality, and the analysis of bias in a manner that's credible, then pay attention to this podcast and get things cleared up. So I guess we might as well get right to the point. And the first thing I'm curious about is, and this is something I think that can be fairly definitively laid at the feet of social psychologists, was that there was an absolute denial that anything like left-wing authoritarianism existed, even conceptually, literally until 2016. Yeah, that's right. For 60 years. I came across that and I thought...
what do you mean there's no such thing as left-wing authoritarianism? We know that. It's like, that's insane.
It's insane. It's insane.
And then there were a couple of papers published in 2016 on left-wing authoritarianism in the Soviet Union. That was the first... breaking of that dam. I did a master's, I supervised a master's thesis at that time. It's a very good thesis on left-wing authoritarianism. And because we showed that there were statistical clumps of reliably characterizable left-wing authoritarian beliefs that did in fact associate statistically and that identifiable groups of people with identifiable temperamental proclivities did hold. I really wanted to follow up on that because it was very rich potential source of new information but my academic career exploded at that point it became impossible so people have taken that have taken that ball and run with it yeah yeah so well yeah yeah tell us about it what have you found well okay how do you let's let's start with some definitions like what constitutes left wing as opposed to right wing authoritarianism let's say right so there are measurement
There are measurement issues across the board, but that is with respect to both left- and right-wing authoritarianism. There are questionnaires, commonly used questionnaires, to assess right-wing authoritarianism and to assess left-wing authoritarianism. They're different. The reason—let me give a little context— For a long time, people tried to develop nonpartisan politics.
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