It has a political diversity problem.
Leftists worship “diversity,” as long as it involves skin color and gender, not opinion.
6 thoughts on “The Psychology Field”
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It has a political diversity problem.
Leftists worship “diversity,” as long as it involves skin color and gender, not opinion.
Comments are closed.
Diversity. It’s only skin deep.
The underrepresentation of non-liberals in social psychology is most likely due to a combination of self-selection, hostile climate, and discrimination.
I’m betting on self selection, those on the right are less interested in the social sciences, other than economics.
…those on the right are less interested in [pseudo] sciences…
FIFY.
Your comment aptly illustrates my point, as I said, blame the absence of political diversity in psychology on self selection.
Hmmm, I don’t know. If it were a bit more like Anthropology rather than political activism, I might have gone into the field.
I’m a STEM person in a very, very liberal field and workplace. It’s awfully difficult to keep my mouth shut sometimes when the ya-ya crowd gets cranked up. Compared to my colleagues, I’m a minority in gender and political leanings; my being there adds significantly to their diversity in those areas. However, the kinds of diversity I bring are two of the kinds my field actively works to reduce.
I have family to support, and if I “came out” as a conservative at work, I suspect I’d rather quickly go from being a valued employee to being downsized. It adds a lot of stress some days. The funny thing is, we’re constantly being told we need more diversity in hiring, and I hear that as, “make sure we don’t get a straight white guy for that new job.” (For my position, it was only straight white guys who applied, so they held their nose and hired me; knowing the political leanings of the women leading the search, coming out as a conservative would have killed my chance of getting the job.) I’m using a pseudonym here now, instead of my real name, which I usually use… Just in case.
Before my current position, I was in academia, and that is no different in general than psychology. Conservatives, especially the dreaded SWM, Oppressor of All, are constantly denigrated as devolved Neanderthals. If, say, an African-American-Hispanic lesbian anarcho-Communist was exposed to the same kind of environment conservative, straight white males experience in academia, we’d have a constant stream of articles about the crisis in academia. But in the actual academia, our heroine would get insta-tenure, whereas a conservative in a tenure-track position who comes out of the political closet probably does fatal damage to the chances of actually earning tenure in most cases.
One can call it self-selection, the reason that conservatives avoid such situations. But it’s more like self-preservation.