The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
Mon, 16 Dec 2024
Dr. Jordan B. Peterson sits down with researcher and Rutgers University Professor of Psychology Lee Jessim. They discuss the denial of Left-wing authoritarianism across academia, how Lee’s research proved such authoritarianism exists, the backlash and attempted cancellations he received for his work, and how he not only survived the battle, but also garnered a promotion as a result. This episode was filmed on December 7th, 2024. | Links | For Lee Jussim: On X https://x.com/PsychRabble?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor
Full Episode
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...
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