Jonathan Haidt goes full Jordan Peterson


Haidt seems to have realized how profitable outrage can be

Never go full Peterson. Unless, that is, you want to tap into the usual conservative grift.

So Haidt has announced that he’s quitting his professional society because they expect a statement about how their work contributes to the greater community. This is a great affront, especially since asking a super-privileged white guy to address issues of equity, inclusion, diversity, and anti-racism is profoundly offensive, I guess.

Last week the New York University (NYU) psychology professor announced that he would resign at the end of the year from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, his primary professional association, because of a newly adopted requirement that everybody presenting research at the group’s conferences explain how their submission advances “equity, inclusion, and anti-racism goals.” It was the sort of litmus test against which he has warned, and which he sees as corroding institutions of higher learning.

“Telos means ‘the end, goal, or purpose for which an act is done, or at which a profession or institution aims,'” he wrote in a Sept. 20 piece published on the website of Heterodox Academy, an organization he cofounded that promotes viewpoint diversity on college campuses, and republished by the Chronicle of Higher Education. “The telos of a knife is to cut, the telos of medicine is to heal, and the telos of a university is truth.” [I’m sorry, that pegged my meter measuring pretentious pomposity in academic jargon]

“The Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP)—recently asked me to violate my quasi-fiduciary duty to the truth,” he added. “I was going to attend the annual conference in Atlanta next February to present some research with colleagues on a new and improved version of the Moral Foundations Questionnaire. I was surprised to learn about a new rule: In order to present research at the conference, all social psychologists are now required to submit a statement explaining ‘whether and how this submission advances the equity, inclusion, and anti-racism goals of SPSP.'”

Such diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) statements have proliferated at universities and in academic societies, he notes, even though “most academic work has nothing to do with diversity, so these mandatory statements force many academics to betray their quasi-fiduciary duty to the truth by spinning, twisting, or otherwise inventing some tenuous connection to diversity.”

This is absurd faux outrage, worthy of a Jordan Peterson. How can you get this upset at a request to justify the social consequences of your research? Is there something wrong with NYU that you can have a long career there and never have to explain how your work fits into the greater “telos” of the institution? Because it’s not simply “truth”, it’s deeper and more complex than that. Universities play a role in society, and it’s not to simply spit out abstract facts. To deny that is to deny a truth.

Also, it wasn’t a litmus test of any kind. The society is not requiring that you meet any diversity, equity, and inclusion requirements to submit an abstract; you’re asked whether your work advances their anti-racism goals. You could say “it doesn’t”, and your work will still be assessed on other criteria. I suspect this new statement is part of an intelligence-gathering effort, to see whether the society as a whole is making contributions to address the problem of racism. From that perspective, maybe Haidt dropping out is going to improve their metrics.

So I took a look at the onerous demands of SPSP. Here they are; they request a short statement to accompany abstracts submitted to their professional meeting.

  • Equity & Anti-racism:
    Evaluate the extent to which the submission advances SPSP’s goal of promoting equity, inclusion and anti-racism. To do so, please consider the equity statement as well as the submission as a whole. Submissions advancing equity, inclusion, and anti-racist goals may include (but are not limited to):

    • Diverse research participants (e.g., understudied or underserved populations)
    • Diverse research methods (e.g., methodology that promotes equity or engages underserved communities or scholars).
    • Diverse members of the research team (e.g., those from underrepresented sociodemographic backgrounds, from an array of career stages, from outside the United States, or with professional affiliations that are not typical at SPSP such as predominately undergraduate serving institutions, minority-serving institutions, or outside academia)
    • Presentation content (e.g., prejudice and discrimination, critical theories, cross-cultural research).

So? How could anyone find that difficult, or contravening the truth, to answer that honestly? That’s routine stuff. Any socially conscious institution could help you address those points with very little effort.

I made that point on Twitter myself.

I got so many responses from people who simply can’t imagine how I would address the social relevance of spider research, like it’s impossible that a biological subject could possibly have any influence on the human world. I think these bozos have a real problem. The SPSP has provided a list to tell you exactly how to answer their concerns.

  • Diverse research participants: my first project was to assess spider populations in the Stevens County community. I specifically sought out sites in a variety of residences, putting out a call in the local newspaper to get volunteers.
  • Diverse research methods: this one is a little tougher for me (fortunately, I don’t have to tick all the boxes) because it was a brief preliminary project without a lot of different approaches. But I could say it involved both field and lab work, and participants were given the choice in how they wanted to work.
  • Diverse members of the research team: ultra easy. I’m at a university that is committed to supporting diverse populations in the region. My student research teams have had native American and non-binary students and men and women actively involved in the work.
  • Presentation content: Another tough one, but not impossible. I’ve done presentations on the importance of spiders to the ecology of our communities to senior citizens and student groups. I can’t honestly say I’ve done work on prejudice or discrimination (although people definitely discriminate against spiders, I don’t think that’s what they mean), but there on my long list of potential projects is a survey of attitudes and spider populations on local reservations, compared to those in town.

I’d probably get my work rejected by the SPSP because it’s way outside the field of psychology, but not because I’m unaware of wider consequences. What blows my mind is that Haidt is a psychologist, studying “moral foundations”, and he blows a gasket because he can’t be bothered to explain, briefly, what this has to do with anti-racism, or diversity, or equity? What’s going on here? Does he only study the attitudes of wealthy white college students, or does he only bring white students into his research lab, and does he refuse to acknowledge the existence of other cultures in his work? I don’t believe any of that could be true (and if it were, it would call into question the validity of all of his research), and it ought to be trivial for him to check off the criteria for presenting at the meeting. At the very least, NYU has to have a diverse student body.

Instead, he chooses to posture and protest and complain. That will endear him to racists and knee-jerk freezepeachers, but it’s not going to cut it with the majority of his peers, who are, I’m sure, seeing this requirement not as a hurdle but an opportunity to make the broader significance of their research more explicit.

Comments

  1. says

    quasi-fiduciary duty to the truth

    I’m trying to unscramble that word-salad and I think he means that the truth is what gets him paid. Except he throws “quasi-” in there. Do that means it kinda gets him paid. Maybe what he means is that, in terms of intellectual honesty and effort he’s strictly minimum wage…? It’s very Jordan Petersonesque – i.e.: incomprehensible deep-sounding whagarbl.

    The last time I heard a lecture about fiduciary responsibility it was from an investment banker (irony!) regarding being on the board of directors of a publicly traded company. So I contextualize ” quasi-fiduciary duty to the truth as perhaps he thinks he’s a director of the good ship Truthtanic trying to minimize the damage to shareholder value caused by that impertinent (and probably culpable) iceberg.

  2. says

    Yeah, that whole thing was boring, tendentious academic speak, and I hated it. I also thought he has clearly mastered the art of saying virtually nothing in a lot of words, so why is he complaining about a requirement to write an, at best, one paragraph justification of his work?

  3. says

    This was a great post. Every point I thought of you addressed in the next sentence or paragraph!

    “Telos means ‘the end, goal, or purpose for which an act is done, or at which a profession or institution aims,’” he wrote in a Sept. 20 piece published on the website of Heterodox Academy, an organization he cofounded that promotes viewpoint diversity on college campuses, and republished by the Chronicle of Higher Education. “The telos of a knife is to cut,…

    One of these things is not like the others.

    Presentation content: Another tough one, but not impossible. I’ve done presentations on the importance of spiders to the ecology of our communities to senior citizens and student groups

    And posted about them on a widely read blog! Really, this category should be wider, to encompass aspects of the presentation that aren’t content-related but related to the means through which people are sharing their research with the diverse wider public and seeking feedback.

    I can’t honestly say I’ve done work on prejudice or discrimination (although people definitely discriminate against spiders, I don’t think that’s what they mean)

    They should! Spiders especially are an animal people irrationally (Australians excluded) fear and loathe, in many of the same ways people carry prejudices against other humans. Educating about and championing spiders and challenging myths about them is important both in and of itself and also to more broadly counteracting these sorts of attitudes. (I can’t say that I’ve overcome my fear of spiders yet, but I’m…maybe…making progress; and certainly at an intellectual level my understanding has changed.)

    I’ve read some of Joshua Bennett’s Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man, which develops these ideas:

    For much of American history, Black people have been conceived and legally defined as nonpersons, a subgenre of the human. In Being Property Once Myself, prizewinning poet Joshua Bennett shows that Blackness has long acted as the caesura between human and nonhuman and delves into the literary imagination and ethical concerns that have emerged from this experience. Each chapter tracks a specific animal—the rat, the cock, the mule, the dog, the shark—in the works of Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Jesmyn Ward, and Robert Hayden. The plantation, the wilderness, the kitchenette overrun with pests, the valuation and sale of animals and enslaved people—all place Black and animal life in fraught proximity.

    Bennett suggests that animals are deployed to assert a theory of Black sociality and to combat dominant claims about the limits of personhood. And he turns to the Black radical tradition to challenge the pervasiveness of anti-Blackness in discourses surrounding the environment and animals. Being Property Once Myself is an incisive work of literary criticism and a groundbreaking articulation of undertheorized notions of dehumanization and the Anthropocene.

  4. hillaryrettig1 says

    so he’s moving from false equivalence (“the left and the right both have their virtues; really, we all need to just talk it out” to fash. is that right?

  5. says

    Haidt has been moving rightward ever since I met him at the UCSB Sage Center in 2008. I remember that he said something creepily misogynistic at the time, though I don’t remember what.

    He is bizarrely lauded for his “moral categories” that not only create a moral parity between fairness and preventing harm on the one hand and loyalty (not snitching, sucking up, saying the election was stolen from Trump, etc.) and feelings of disgust (ooh, anal sex, yuck!) on the other, but his categories completely omit honesty as a moral value.

  6. birgerjohansson says

    Naah. Honesty is librul BS.
    You need moral champions like Putin to stand up for traditional values, and he is not honest at all.

  7. consciousness razor says

    Haidt:

    Do you agree that all four of these professors have behaved unprofessionally? All four are treating their students as means to advance their own ends: financial, sexual, religious, and political. (I made Professor D be right-wing, but I assume you’ll agree that the violation is just as bad for a left-wing activist in a blue state.) All four have therefore violated their quasi-fiduciary duty of loyalty, which requires them to advance their students’ education, not their own projects. I believe that all four should be subject to disciplinary action. What do you think?

    I don’t know about those fictional characters, but this guy right here clearly needs to be subject to disciplinary action….

    Haidt describes how he began to study political psychology in order to help the Democratic Party win more elections,

    But no, it’s okay, because it’s okay (more bullshit from 2016):

    Please note: I am not saying that an individual student cannot pursue both goals. In the talk below I urge students to embrace truth as the only way that they can pursue activism that will effectively enhance social justice. But an institution such as a university must have one and only one highest and inviolable good.

    Why must that be? Because otherwise, he’s just making shit up. Says who? Jonathan Haidt says. So there.

    By the way, he’s done a great job at helping Democrats win more elections (except that this is insane and he didn’t do that at all). Back to wikipedia:

    Haidt is involved with several efforts to help bridge the political divide and reduce political polarization in the United States. In 2007, he founded the website CivilPolitics.org, a clearinghouse for research on political civility.[45] He serves on the advisory boards of Represent.Us., a non-partisan anti-corruption organization; the Acumen Fund, which invests in companies, leaders, and ideas that are changing the way the world tackles poverty; and braverangels.org, a bipartisan group working to reduce political polarization.

    I suppose it’s my fiduciary duty to note that all of these efforts have been remarkably successful, assuming the telos is about advancing his bullshit career and not actually about any of that muddle-headed crap (which, if you’re dumb enough to buy it, is supposed to sound vaguely like real philanthropy).

  8. chrislawson says

    [1] As pointed out, using the ancient Greek word “telos” in place of the perfectly functional plain English equivalent “purpose” is pretentious twaddle.

    [2] The purpose of universities is research and teaching. Obviously it’s crucial to imbue a culture of truthfulness in that setting, but saying the purpose of universities is truth is tritely reductive nonsense. It’s like saying the purpose of writing is words.

    [3] And how exactly is asking for a description of social impact in any way oppositional to truth?

  9. chrislawson says

    SC–

    Even in Australia, the danger of spiders is wildly overstated. There is only one truly dangerous group, the funnelwebs. They live in a small region (well, small by Australian standards), there are only around 30 confirmed bites a year of which only half are envenomated, and since the development of antivenom in 1981 there have been zero deaths.

  10. chrislawson says

    I suspect the drift of some academics to the right can be explained by conservativism’s tolerance of any stupidity and hypocrisy so long as it supports the agenda. For lazy superficial thinkers like Haidt, the conservative movement is a very tempting host.

  11. John Morales says

    chrislawson:

    [1] As pointed out, using the ancient Greek word “telos” in place of the perfectly functional plain English equivalent “purpose” is pretentious twaddle.

    And yet, it’s seen as normal to use ‘theist’ for ‘goddist’ and ‘theism’ for ‘goddism’.

  12. Silentbob says

    @ 12 John Morales

    *facepalm*

    The criticism is not of common English words having Greek or Latinate roots. It’s of the ostentatious avoidance of common English words.
    Capiche?

  13. says

    @chrislawson

    Haidt’s “I used to be a liberal” shtick brought him fame and fortune way out of proportion to the quality and value of his work. And of course his muddling of his supposedly objective academic work with his normative ideological politics gets a pass in a way that never happens for those on the left.

    Also, not to excuse Haidt’s unnecessary use of it, but “telos” is not quite the same as “purpose” … e.g., we could talk about the “telos” of biological traits without imputing agency to evolution–see, e.g., Ernst Mayr’s notion of teleonomy: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleonomy

  14. John Morales says

    Silentbob:

    The criticism is not of common English words having Greek or Latinate roots. It’s of the ostentatious avoidance of common English words.

    Which is why my riff began with “And yet,”.
    Not exactly disputing the criticism, is it?

    (Again: ‘theist’ sounds much better than ‘goddist’ — certainly to goddists)

    Capiche?

    Capìre.

    (The asymmetry is that I can tell when you’re trying to be droll)

  15. dangerousbeans says

    The telos of a knife is to cut

    If he spent more time studying the social and historical context of knives he would realise this is not actually the case. A lot of knives exist more for fashion or capitalism than cutting ability.