Progressives and liberals delight in any sort of pseudoscience that implicates the right wing, especially if it can claim their political opposition has a brain defect or some sort of 'control' fetish.
They don't like it at all when anything psychological makes them look less moral. And they really don't like Jonathan Haidt - because he is a liberal, atheist social psychologist and therefore should only go after conservatives. He confesses he once thought of conservatism as a “Frankenstein monster,”, an ugly mishmash of Christian fundamentalism, racism and authoritarianism.
Well, he is right, some people on the right are just those things. What most of their critics fail to realize is that the left are also; replace Christian fundamentalism with atheist fundamentalism and keep the other two, and that is progressives to a tee. The right wants to ban pot and the left wants to ban cigarettes. The right wants to ban gay marriage and the left wants to ban Big Gulps.
He's been critical of discrimination against right-wing people in modern academia too. It's hard to dismiss the data. We can't simultaneously contend that stereotype threat and gender bias exist for women and minorities and yet conservatives, with far less representation, are self-selecting themselves out of high-paying jobs in academia. It is a complex rationalization that defies Occam's razor. Instead, he notes a recent study: “In decisions ranging from paper reviews to hiring, many social and personality psychologists admit that they would discriminate against openly conservative colleagues. The more liberal respondents are, the more willing they are to discriminate.”
Kudos to social psychologists for being honest about their bias. A loud minority of people, including in science, are not. But they are minority with a large amount of control over who gets hired.
Read the profile of Haidt's work at:
Conservatives have broader moral sense than liberals, says ‘Righteous Mind’ author by Emily Esfahani Smith, Washington Times
