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Episode: 506. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim

Author: Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
Duration: 01:41:42

Episode Shownotes

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 Transcript

00:00:14 Speaker_01
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. likely because the topic of concentration has more long-lasting significance, all things considered.

00:00:32 Speaker_01
So, in any case, I spoke today with Lee Jussum, and Lee is the distinguished professor of psychology at Rutgers, and he's been the chair there of the Department of Psychology and

00:00:45 Speaker_01
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.

00:01:00 Speaker_01
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

00:01:15 Speaker_01
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.

00:01:29 Speaker_01
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.

00:01:48 Speaker_01
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...

00:02:00 Speaker_01
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

00:02:16 Speaker_01
Marxist 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.

00:02:32 Speaker_01
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.

00:02:50 Speaker_01
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.

00:03:12 Speaker_01
So I guess we might as well get right to the point.

00:03:14 Speaker_01
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.

00:03:30 Speaker_01
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 there are. That's insane.

00:03:43 Speaker_00
It's insane.

00:03:44 Speaker_01
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 damn I did a master's I supervised a master's thesis at that time.

00:03:57 Speaker_01
It's a very good thesis on left-wing authoritarianism and Because we showed that there were statistical clumps of reliably

00:04:07 Speaker_01
characterizable left-wing authoritarian beliefs that did in fact associate statistically and that identifiable groups of people with identifiable temperamental proclivities did hold.

00:04:20 Speaker_01
I really wanted to follow up on that because it was a very rich potential source of new information, but my academic career exploded at that point. It became impossible. People have taken that ball and run with it. Tell us about it. What have you found?

00:04:39 Speaker_01
Let's start with some definitions. What constitutes left-wing as opposed to right-wing authoritarianism, let's say?

00:04:48 Speaker_00
There are measurement issues across the board, but that is with respect to both left and right-wing authoritarianism.

00:04:54 Speaker_00
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 a nonpartisan

00:05:25 Speaker_00
authoritarianism scales, if authoritarianism was a psychological construct rather than a political one.

00:05:31 Speaker_00
And they couldn't really do it because one of the core toxic elements of authoritarianism is a motivation to crush, deprive of humanity and human rights, one's political opponents.

00:05:47 Speaker_00
So you need to assess either right or left-wing authoritarianism vis-a-vis the attitudes towards one's opponents in order to measure the construct.

00:05:58 Speaker_01
Okay, so that's a very interesting definition, though, because you're pointing to the fact that

00:06:05 Speaker_01
Arguably, and tell me if you think this is right, the core of authoritarianism, which as you said, can't be measured outside the political, isn't precisely political. It's your attitude towards those who don't agree with you. Yes, it is.

00:06:19 Speaker_01
But you have to have some beliefs for that to be.

00:06:21 Speaker_00
I didn't say can't. I say they have not succeeded. Actually, one of my current graduate students is for her master's thesis in the process of trying to develop a non-partisan authoritarianism scale. Based on that idea. Yes, based on that idea.

00:06:35 Speaker_00
I don't know if she's going to succeed.

00:06:36 Speaker_01
Okay, so I'm thinking about that clinically. It's like...

00:06:39 Speaker_01
Well, that's where you'd start to look at overlap between cluster B personality psychopathology, narcissism, borderline personality disorder, histrionic, because those are the people who are very likely to elevate their own status at the cost of other people, including their children and those they purport to love.

00:07:02 Speaker_00
So the first step, to do that is to develop scales that adequately—survey questions that adequately get at left or right-wing authoritarianism, and then correlate them with things measuring narcissism or sadism or whatever.

00:07:18 Speaker_00
People have done that on the left, and it does correlate with left-wing authoritarianism.

00:07:24 Speaker_00
I don't know—you know, you never know for sure the limits of your own knowledge, so I don't know if anyone has even tried to do this on the right, or maybe they have and it doesn't actually correspond with narcissism on the right.

00:07:38 Speaker_00
It corresponds with other things on the right, but not so much with—if there's evidence on narcissism correlating with right-wing authoritarianism, I don't know it.

00:07:50 Speaker_01
Nothing at the moment comes to mind. I have a memory of a memory of something associated with that because I've tried to follow the literature, but I've definitely seen it emerge on the left. Correlations on the right. Well, from what I remember,

00:08:07 Speaker_01
and I'm vague about this because I can't give you sources, is that dark tetrad traits stand out quite markedly as associated with authoritarianism. And I thought that was somewhat independent of whether it was left or right.

00:08:21 Speaker_01
But I can't provide the sources at the moment. I review them in this new book I wrote on We Who Wrestle With God. There's a lot of reference to the dark tetrad personality constellations and the political manifestations.

00:08:33 Speaker_01
But okay, but you've been studying it. Okay, so when we looked at

00:08:37 Speaker_01
The way we developed our measure, because I'd like to know how you developed yours, is we took a very large sample of political opinions and then factor analyzed them to find out if we could identify first clumps of left-wing and clumps of right-wing belief, which you can clearly identify, and then to look within the left-wing constellation to see if there is a reliable subcategory of clearly authoritarian proclivities.

00:09:02 Speaker_01
And we found the biggest predictor of left-wing authoritarianism was low verbal IQ. It was a walloping predictor, negative 0.40. immense predictor.

00:09:15 Speaker_01
So that's something to, because you know, one of the things we talked about at the beginning of the podcast was that some of these ideas sound good in the absence of further critical evaluation.

00:09:26 Speaker_01
So that you might say, well, if you lack the capacity for deep verbal critical evaluation, what apparently moral ideas would appeal to you?

00:09:35 Speaker_01
And well, you can imagine that there might be a set of them and one of them would be, well, don't be mean to people who aren't like you. Which is a perfectly good rule of thumb.

00:09:46 Speaker_01
It doesn't mean that everyone who says that's what they're for are, in fact, agitating on behalf of that principle.

00:09:53 Speaker_00
So back to your research. Yeah, yeah, okay. First, let me be clear.

00:09:58 Speaker_00
Other than my student, Sonia, who is trying to develop a nonpartisan authoritarianism scale, the work that we have done using either left-wing or right-wing authoritarianism scales are scales developed by other people.

00:10:10 Speaker_00
We haven't developed the scales.

00:10:12 Speaker_01
So for left— And do you think there are good scales now for left- and right-wing authoritarianism? Adequate scales?

00:10:21 Speaker_00
Adequate for right, yes, and pretty good for left. Even though the research on left is much more recent, you might think it would be therefore less well-established.

00:10:33 Speaker_00
There's two teams, one led by Luke Conway and a different one led by Tom Costello, have done a lot of very good both psychometric

00:10:43 Speaker_00
the sort of statistical assessment of how things hang together, and also validity assessment of their two slightly different, somewhat different scales.

00:10:53 Speaker_01
You can tell if someone's belief is part of a set of identifiable beliefs. If they hold that belief, the fact they hold that belief predicts reliably that they hold another belief, right?

00:11:05 Speaker_01
And then you want to see a pattern like that emerge across a lot of people. Then you see that there are associations of ideas, right? Those would be something like, the manifestation of an ideology.

00:11:16 Speaker_01
You want to see if that's identifiable, what its boundaries are, that it can be distinguished from other clumps of ideas. So left could be distinguished from right. This can all be done statistically and very reliably.

00:11:27 Speaker_01
Now it wasn't done by social psychologists from the end of World War II till 2016. Shameful lacuna in the history of political analysis within the psychological community. It shocked me when I first discovered it. Me too, me too. It was shocking. Really?

00:11:45 Speaker_01
Talk about blind spots. Oh my God.

00:11:47 Speaker_00
I mean, I know.

00:11:48 Speaker_01
It's like, oh, do you guys miss Mao and Stalin? Yeah, I know, right? How do you miss that? I don't know, how do you miss that? It's like, it's fairly obvious.

00:11:54 Speaker_00
And then they denied it.

00:11:55 Speaker_01
You're a social psychologist, the biggest... social movements of the 20, the biggest pathological social movements of the 20th century had their existence denied for 70 years. Right, right. Mind-boggling. It's mind-boggling.

00:12:10 Speaker_01
I've never recovered from discovery.

00:12:14 Speaker_00
Yes.

00:12:14 Speaker_01
It took me like a year to even believe it was true. Okay, so you're using other people's questions. So what's your approach?

00:12:21 Speaker_00
How are you investigating this? Well, it does depend on the study. So this is one good one that I think I can describe shortly, quickly. We administered cartoons, like political cartoons,

00:12:39 Speaker_00
as if they were memes, like social media memes, to an online sample, about 1,000 people, and asked them how much they liked the cartoons and memes, and we told them,

00:12:58 Speaker_00
to vote for their favorite, because the one that received the most votes, we would actually post on social media. Now, that was a lie. It was deception, and we explained that at the end.

00:13:11 Speaker_00
But we wanted them to believe that when they were selecting something, that this was as close as we could get to a behavior. It was close to them posting it. They believed their vote could influence what we posted.

00:13:24 Speaker_00
So it was a real-world outcome of something that would be promoted. Rather than just, like, liking or disliking. Right, right. Or self-report that they believe something. That's right.

00:13:33 Speaker_00
So two of the—I'm going to describe two of the cartoons, which were quite a contrast to each other. We actually had a set kind of like the first and a set like the second, but I can describe the two quickly enough.

00:13:46 Speaker_00
The first was actually a political propaganda cartoon from the Soviet Union. We didn't tell them that, from the 1930s, 1940s, anti-American propaganda. But we didn't tell them that.

00:13:57 Speaker_00
We just presented the cartoon, which showed a long-distance shot of this. In the top panel was a long-distance shot of the Statue of Liberty. The bottom panel was a close-up of her head and her crown, and the spires of the crown were KKK members.

00:14:21 Speaker_00
People dressed in KKK, whatever. Right, right, right.

00:14:25 Speaker_01
So true nature of American liberty.

00:14:27 Speaker_00
Right, right. American liberty is just— So that's a power race. It's typical Marxist trope. Yeah, yes, right, okay. That was one. Yeah. And then the second— was an image of a diverse group of people.

00:14:43 Speaker_00
People, different racial and ethnic groups, wearing clothes for different professions, so it might be a bus driver, or a businessman, or a secretary, or a teacher, or whatever.

00:14:54 Speaker_00
There were a whole bunch of different kinds of people in obviously different roles, kind of in a crowd with their arms around each other under an American flag. sort of pluralistic diversity. That's kind of a humanistic form of diversity.

00:15:09 Speaker_00
And then we simply ask people, you know, we ask them, which ones do you like the most? Which ones do you want to share on social media? And, hmm.

00:15:17 Speaker_01
And then- So is that a benevolent left view and an authoritarian left view?

00:15:21 Speaker_00
Yes, exactly. That's the idea. Right, that's right.

00:15:24 Speaker_01
Demonizing America versus- We did find in our analysis that there's a liberal left, that's clear, and there's an authoritarian left. And the liberal left, this is part of our investigation, the liberal left isn't, how did we figure that out?

00:15:42 Speaker_01
The liberal left doesn't partake of the attitudes of the... Radical authoritarian. Yes, but they're the ones that I also think that they're sort of oblivious nights.

00:15:52 Speaker_00
Yes.

00:15:52 Speaker_01
Yes, I think that's true And we had is what we found.

00:15:55 Speaker_00
Hey, we found in the study.

00:15:56 Speaker_01
I got a research idea. Yes.

00:15:58 Speaker_01
Yes, it's relevant to this Well with regards to these questionnaires, it's something that I wanted to do You know the large language models track statistical probability so you can take those left-wing Questionnaire sets and you can ask chat GPT.

00:16:11 Speaker_01
Here's an item or here's three items generate 30 more and And it doesn't. Yeah, yeah.

00:16:17 Speaker_00
Right.

00:16:17 Speaker_01
So if you wanted to improve the statistical reliability of the measures, so you can imagine, take the measures that already exist.

00:16:25 Speaker_01
put them in clumps of three in ChatGPT, have it expanded out to like 300 items, administer it to 1,000 people and distill it. Because the thing- That's a great idea.

00:16:36 Speaker_01
This will speed things up radically because the thing about the large language models is they already have the statistical correlations built in. When you ask ChatGPT to generate 40 items that are conceptually like these four, that's what it does.

00:16:51 Speaker_01
It's not an opinion. So you can use ChatGP to purify the questionnaires. And you can do that on the left and on the right. And it takes like 10 minutes instead of two years. I'm gonna bring this back to Sonya.

00:17:03 Speaker_00
This is great. Sonya's a fan of your podcast. I'm sure she's gonna see this. I'll probably talk to her before, but hi, Sonya.

00:17:11 Speaker_01
We should be doing this with all the questionnaires, like it's the same with narcissism. See, the other thing you could do with ChatGPT is you could say, here's 20 items significant of narcissism, okay?

00:17:23 Speaker_01
Which is the central item and can you generate 20 items that are better markers of that central tendency? And the thing is, it can do it because it's mapped the linguistic representations.

00:17:34 Speaker_01
So all the factor structures already built into the ChatGPT systems, like all of it.

00:17:39 Speaker_00
That's great.

00:17:40 Speaker_01
Yeah. So, okay. So, so let this is one of the things I would pursue if I still had a research lab, right? These things are hard to pursue without having that structure in place. But I think this radically Speed up the process.

00:17:54 Speaker_01
Radically speed up the process.

00:17:56 Speaker_00
I totally see that.

00:17:56 Speaker_01
And also make it much more reliable and valid.

00:17:59 Speaker_00
I think that's right. We'll have to try it. We'll have to try it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:18:04 Speaker_01
Try it out. Absolutely. All right, so back to, all right, so now you've got people voting for one comic or the other.

00:18:11 Speaker_00
Yes, and it was exactly as you described before we went down the large language model path, that liberals who are not, so we use statistical regression, we can separate out

00:18:22 Speaker_00
being liberal but not authoritarian from being a left-wing authoritarian but not liberal. Liberalism predicted endorsement of the sort of humanistic diversity image, the people together under an American flag.

00:18:34 Speaker_00
We're all different, but we're all in it together. We love America, blah, blah, blah. It was left-wing authoritarianism powerfully predicted endorsement of the Soviet propaganda. The Statue of Liberty is KKK.

00:18:47 Speaker_01
And so the questionnaires predicted that?

00:18:48 Speaker_00
Yes, yes. Oh, that's good. That's good.

00:18:50 Speaker_01
Yeah, yeah. It's a great study, so.

00:18:53 Speaker_01
Another thing you might want to do is take that questionnaire, do an item analysis with regards to preference, and rank order the items in terms of their predictive validity in relationship to the cartoon, because you might be able to see which of the

00:19:06 Speaker_01
items are central, especially if you saw that pattern across multiple cartoons. Yeah, yeah, okay, okay, okay.

00:19:13 Speaker_00
Yeah, so that's one. We do this kind of thing.

00:19:16 Speaker_01
Well, how many studies have you done now on left-wing authoritarianism?

00:19:19 Speaker_00
Well, it's a lot. I mean, it's a lot. We include it in almost everything. We include measures of left- and right-wing authoritarianism in most of the studies we've been conducting. Right, right. So tell us what you found.

00:19:34 Speaker_00
The most recent splash, and I think that's what got your staff member interested in having me on here, were three experimental studies assessing the psychological impacts of common DEI rhetoric and head of country. Right, right.

00:19:56 Speaker_00
And we did it with three different kinds of DEI rhetoric.

00:20:01 Speaker_01
Yeah, those are probably studies that I'd run across of yours.

00:20:04 Speaker_00
I remember that now. Yeah, that's one that's fairly recent, and they've made more of a splash than I would have expected.

00:20:10 Speaker_01
Well, it's one thing to say that DEI programs work. It's another thing to say they don't work, and it's a completely different thing to say they do the opposite of what— Yeah, that's not good, and it seems to me highly probable.

00:20:22 Speaker_01
You know, suicide prevention programs, the kind the government's always running, they make suicide rates go up. Well, because, why? You're advertising and normalizing suicide. Right. And you think, well, we're going to put up a prevention program.

00:20:39 Speaker_01
It's like, first, are you clinically trained? Second, did you do the research? Third, did you ever stop to consider that your conceptualization of the problem might be inadequate in relationship to its solution?

00:20:53 Speaker_01
There's so many things like this that happen. Clinicians have become, the research-oriented clinicians have become very, very sensitive to such things because it's frequently the case that a well-meaning intervention will make things worse.

00:21:05 Speaker_01
And then you might ask why. It's like, well, there's 50,000 ways something... could be worse, and like one way it could be better.

00:21:14 Speaker_01
And so just, it's an overwhelmingly high probability that whatever you do to change something that works makes it worse, right? Okay, so now, so do you, what was your evidence that the DEI interventions made? What was made worse?

00:21:32 Speaker_01
What interventions and what was your evidence linking them?

00:21:34 Speaker_00
Yes, okay, so let me walk through Let me qualify this a little bit. We examined the rhetoric that is common to many DEI interventions. GPD can do a very good job of that, by the way. Kind of. The problem is a lot of the materials

00:21:58 Speaker_00
used in DEI trainings aren't publicly available. So it's actually hard, and we can say they're common to things we had access to, but we don't, a lot is not publicly available. So that's an important limitation.

00:22:12 Speaker_00
That's an important limitation that your listeners, viewers should understand. It's not like we evaluated the effectiveness of the DEI training program instituted by the HR department of the city of Milwaukee. We didn't do that.

00:22:28 Speaker_00
We took the intellectual ideas from three different kinds of sources, anti-racism rhetoric, anti-Islamophobia rhetoric, and anti-caste, the Hindu caste system, anti-caste oppression rhetoric.

00:22:44 Speaker_00
For race, we used passages from Kendi's How to Be an Antiracist and from D'Angelo's White Fragility. These books were widely required throughout colleges. You know, there's sometimes... She is paid $40,000 a session to come in and give her training.

00:23:06 Speaker_00
So... And we also actually used this sort of large-language model, this sort of language network analysis to examine the extent to which this type of rhetoric was common throughout the training materials we had access to, and it was very common.

00:23:25 Speaker_01
Yeah, OK, OK, fine, fine. So you used that as a validation technique.

00:23:28 Speaker_00
You know what, just so I have this here. So let me give an example from the race... And this is just a short excerpt. So people would read, so they would read, say, an anti-racist passage or a control passage.

00:23:47 Speaker_00
The control passage in these studies in 203 was about how to grow corn on the farm. It was completely separate. And this is only a short excerpt of a longer passage. This is the anti-racism.

00:24:00 Speaker_00
White people raised in Western society are conditioned into a white supremacist worldview. Racism is the norm. It is not unusual. It just went on for a full paragraph.

00:24:10 Speaker_00
And it was quotes smoothed together with a little writing by us of Kendi and D'Angelo.

00:24:17 Speaker_01
Okay, all right.

00:24:18 Speaker_00
So, they then were presented with a very brief scenario in which a college admissions officer interviews an applicant, and ultimately the applicant is rejected from admission. That's the whole scenario.

00:24:38 Speaker_00
I mean, the words are slightly different because I'm doing that piece from memory, but that's basically the whole scenario. They were then asked a series of questions. assessing how much perceived racism and bias was... Was the causal factor.

00:24:54 Speaker_00
Yeah, yeah, yeah. On the part of the admissions officer. Okay. And what we found is when they got the Kendi D'Angelo essay, they claimed to have seen or observed the admissions officer committing more microaggressions.

00:25:13 Speaker_00
treating the applicant more unfairly, and that the admissions officer was more biased.

00:25:23 Speaker_01
Okay, so I'm going to put on my devil's advocate hat, and I'm going to play Robin D'Angelo, despite wearing this Trump badge, and I'm going to say, well,

00:25:38 Speaker_01
the effects of institutional racism are so pervasive that they even invaded your experimental material.

00:25:45 Speaker_01
And the consequence of being exposed to the contents of my writing, speaking as Robin D'Angelo, was that the scales fell from the eyes of your experimental subjects and they were able to perceive the racism that we claimed was there in a manner they couldn't before.

00:26:01 Speaker_00
Yes, that is probably what D'Angelo would say. Actually, I can tell you a little bit about what Kendi did say, because he was asked about it. He did not say that. If someone said that, I would say, well, in our scenario, none of that was evident.

00:26:15 Speaker_00
You had to read that into the scenario. And that is the point.

00:26:19 Speaker_01
How do you know that your own implicit bias didn't stop you from seeing the bias that was there?

00:26:26 Speaker_00
Because anyone can look at the scenario. People didn't even have racial information about the admissions officer and the applicant.

00:26:34 Speaker_01
So, you know- Okay, so you regard it as highly improbable that what they were reading into the situation, that what they were, you regard it as highly probable that they were reading into the situation.

00:26:46 Speaker_01
Okay, let me ask you a couple more technical questions.

00:26:48 Speaker_00
Yes, yes.

00:26:50 Speaker_01
How much of this material were they exposed to before they did the evaluation? About a paragraph. Just a paragraph. Just a paragraph. How soon before the evaluation? Pretty soon. Okay.

00:26:59 Speaker_01
Do you have any idea what the lag time, like if you did a dose response study, so to speak, is there a decay? Like how permanent are the effects? I know I couldn't expect you to do all that in one study, but it's germane, right?

00:27:15 Speaker_00
Well, it is. So, on the narrow issue of how long do the effects we observed in this study last, we didn't study that. So, I have no answer to that. Yeah, of course. Okay.

00:27:30 Speaker_00
But given that we observed the effects that we did, the sort of people concocting racism where there was no evidence of it, on the basis of a very minor intervention. It's like reading a single paragraph.

00:27:47 Speaker_00
It at least raises the possibility that when people are in a culture or organizational context in which this type of rhetoric is pervasive, that they are constantly being exposed or primed to think about race in these terms.

00:28:09 Speaker_00
And because of the steady diet of this kind of rhetoric, the effects are likely to be more enduring than anything we could possibly observe.

00:28:19 Speaker_01
Right, right. Fair enough. Well, I would also say probably you evaluated some of the weaker systemic effects of that kind of rhetoric, because it isn't merely exposure to the rhetoric, it's the fact that

00:28:32 Speaker_01
post-hawk detection of such things as microaggressions, let's say, are radically rewarded by the participants in those ideological systems. Absolutely. That's a more powerful effect. So you got it with weak exposure, fundamentally. And no reward, right?

00:28:49 Speaker_00
You're picking to the social reward.

00:28:51 Speaker_01
Exactly, exactly. So I would say that the weakness of your intervention demonstrated the power of the rhetoric. OK, what did Kendi have to say about this? He described us as racist pseudoscientists. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

00:29:08 Speaker_01
OK, well, that pretty much covers the territory. Did he say why? Or was that unnecessary? How are you at wasting money? My sense is that he was particularly good at that. So yeah, university money, counterproductively.

00:29:24 Speaker_00
Well, I think most of his was from actually, what's his name? Jack Dorsey from Twitter, I think gave him $10 million. So at least it wasn't state money, right?

00:29:33 Speaker_01
Yeah, right, right, right. Okay, well then, we can just let it go. So, okay, okay. OK, you said that produced quite a splash, including enhanced probability of being on this podcast, for example.

00:29:48 Speaker_01
So I'd followed your work for a long time before coming across that. What effect has it had? When was the study published, first of all? And is it a sequence? Is it a single study?

00:30:00 Speaker_00
No, it's three studies. So, it's essentially the same structure for an anti-Islamophobia intervention and an anti-caste oppression, and it's essentially the same results.

00:30:11 Speaker_00
There's little minor differences, but it's essentially the same pattern of results. They're not So, these studies I conducted in collaboration with the NCRI. NCRI is the Network Contagion Research Institute.

00:30:26 Speaker_00
They are a freestanding research institute that started out mostly doing research along the lines of this sort of large language model stuff that you were talking about earlier, analysis of social media and analysis of

00:30:44 Speaker_00
radicalism, conspiracy theories, hate, sort of groups and individuals mobilizing online. And they've done it with all sorts of stuff. They've done it with COVID conspiracies. They've done it with QAnon. They've done it with Islamophobia.

00:30:58 Speaker_00
They've done it with anti-Hindu hate. They've done it with anti-Semitism. They were the first group of any kind, as far as I know,

00:31:10 Speaker_00
in the summer of 2020, the height of the George Floyd social justice protests, which as you remember, the rhetoric on the left, this is consistent with what you were talking about earlier about how the reasonable left is in complete denial of the far left.

00:31:26 Speaker_00
It is literally true that most of the protests were peaceful.

00:31:32 Speaker_00
whenever someone would present evidence of some protests not being peaceful at all, like firebombing a police station or capturing downtown Seattle or all sorts of, you know, setting, by creating sort of setting the stage for lawlessness, you would have looting and robberies that weren't really part of the protest, but people were taking advantage of the sort of police-free zones and stuff.

00:32:01 Speaker_00
When you would talk about that, the response was, this is all just right wing. Yeah, right.

00:32:06 Speaker_01
Yeah, I talked to moderate Democrats who told me that Antifa was a figment of the right wing imagination. Yes, right. But there's something weird about that that's very much worth pointing out, I believe, is that we radically underestimate the effect

00:32:24 Speaker_01
a very small minority of people who are organized can have in destabilizing a society.

00:32:29 Speaker_01
So for example, in the flux of the aftermath of World War I, Russia was chaotic enough so that a very small minority of people, that would be the Bolsheviks, destabilized and captured the entire country. So even if

00:32:47 Speaker_01
The true radicals on the left are 3%. Say, well, 97% of them are peaceful. It's like, fair enough. But you're suffering from the delusion that a demented minority is harmless.

00:33:01 Speaker_00
And that's seriously wrong. So this, enter the NCRI.

00:33:08 Speaker_00
In summer of 2020, when this was all the record, most of the protests, complete denial, mainstream media, that there was violence and bombings and all sorts of other stuff, the NCRI, this is the first project I did with them, produces an analysis finding that the far-left groups

00:33:36 Speaker_00
Not conventional liberals or Democrats, but these far-left radical groups were exploiting the earnest commitment to anti-racism or the social justice on the part of people justifiably upset about George Floyd's murder and the implications about that for racism beyond that.

00:34:01 Speaker_00
But these far-left groups were exploiting that to both gin up supporters and to mobilize online, this is all occurring on social media, to capture protests, to ratchet up and inspire more aggressive violence at the protests.

00:34:21 Speaker_01
So this, you know- That's exactly what you'd expect. Of course that's going to happen.

00:34:25 Speaker_00
I know, right. Clearly, if you believe in criminals. Yeah, right, right, okay. So, and then, so, and then Sarah would, in this report would then link the increased online activity. You know, there'd be memes like, ACAB, all cops are bastards.

00:34:43 Speaker_00
You know, so there'd be things like that. And some of the groups were actually using social media to coordinate their, you know, the sort of violent protest activities. So, live, I'm making this up, but it was this kind of thing.

00:35:03 Speaker_00
People would be, you know, at these protests on their phones. They would get instructions from some sort of central police that the cops were over here, so everybody needs to go over there.

00:35:16 Speaker_00
And that's how they would have... So they were getting tactical instructions live via social media, in addition to sort of ginning up the rhetoric to garner support and adherence. Okay.

00:35:30 Speaker_00
So, before they brought me on, maybe two or three months before, the NCRI had posted a report on how far right groups do essentially the same thing.

00:35:41 Speaker_00
You know, sort of mobilize online using memes and catchphrases and, you know, garner adherence, you know, gain adherence and stuff.

00:35:50 Speaker_00
So, they bring me on, we do this thing and this paper on the far left, which really looks to me – it looked to me like the far left groups were seeking to ignite an actual revolution.

00:36:06 Speaker_01
Well, that is what they do.

00:36:07 Speaker_00
I know, right? Yes, this is the same far-fetched, right?

00:36:10 Speaker_01
They can dance in the ashes that way. Right, yes. The real criminal psychopaths, the short-term guys, the narcissists, they thrive in chaos because they're Their niche is chaos, right?

00:36:25 Speaker_00
Yes. I was kind of new to that at the time, but in hindsight, yes, absolutely. Yeah, well, it's a shocking thing to know.

00:36:33 Speaker_00
The NCRI, to no credit to me, I'm an academic, I'm a professor, I don't do this kind of thing, had access to journalists at the New York Times and Washington Post who ran stories on this report.

00:36:50 Speaker_00
And it was the first time there was any acknowledgment in the mainstream media that there was any level of violence and danger in the protests. I felt really good about this. This was like September 2020.

00:37:04 Speaker_00
We did the work over the summer, the thing came. But that report is not published in a peer-reviewed journal. NCRI has its own website. And they published these reports, kind of like old times.

00:37:15 Speaker_01
And that's where your studies were, were what?

00:37:17 Speaker_00
Yes and no. So, as of right now, that's where they are. They're available on the NCRI website. Okay, and who did that? Was it a postdoc, a doctoral student? It was a bunch of, well, it was, so...

00:37:30 Speaker_00
It was me, two of my grad students, although both of my grad students also work closely with the NCRI. And then there were a series of analysts at the NCRI, including their head researcher. So, a bunch of us are co-authors on this.

00:37:44 Speaker_00
So, I've now been working with them for several years. And it took a while for us to get used to each other. You know, their strength is this online social media, large language model, topic network stuff.

00:37:57 Speaker_00
you know, with an eye towards threats and conspiracy theories and hate. And my strength is conventional social science surveys. Yeah, that's a nice overlap. It is. Yeah, it's a nice overlap, definitely. We needed to figure out the best synergies.

00:38:09 Speaker_00
Yeah, yeah, no doubt. It took a while, but we have this rhythm.

00:38:12 Speaker_01
So why that approach with regards to the dissemination of this information, this particular experiment of information, rather than the more standard journal approach?

00:38:21 Speaker_00
Yeah, so... One of the things, first let me give context, a little more context. So our rhythm is first we post stuff essentially as a white paper, as a report on the NCRI site.

00:38:34 Speaker_00
It gets some attention, some public vetting, we get some feedback on it, and then we scale it up for peer review. Well, that's not— Unlike doing a pre-release on it in a convention. Yes, okay. Now, it's a little different.

00:38:47 Speaker_00
It's different, it is like, I have taken to calling it a homespun preprint. And here is why I call it a homespun preprint. It's like a preprint in that it's a report of empirical studies that is posted online that haven't been peer reviewed.

00:39:03 Speaker_00
It is unlike a conventional preprint in that it is, and this is the answer to your question, why did we do it this way rather than wait for peer review? This is part of the answer. It is, even though some of it is highly technical,

00:39:17 Speaker_00
a lot of the worst of the technical stuff is stripped down so that it is comprehensible to the lay intelligent audience. And...

00:39:29 Speaker_00
That has a value in and of its own right, because the problem with peer review is that it could ease, well, there are many problems with peer review, especially now. You're right, there's many, yeah, right, okay.

00:39:39 Speaker_00
But one of them is that it could take a year or two years. Legged public. Right, right. It's horrible, right.

00:39:47 Speaker_01
Unforgivable. Yeah, that's right. It needs to be, that whole system I've been thinking about.

00:39:52 Speaker_00
It needs to be upended. Completely.

00:39:54 Speaker_01
It's like, in this day and age, a two-year lag to publication, it's completely insane.

00:40:01 Speaker_00
It's crazy. That's right.

00:40:02 Speaker_01
You spend 30% of your time writing grand applications that go nowhere, and two years to lag to publication that almost no one is likely to read. That's right. How the hell have you not been canceled? Why is that? Because it's weird.

00:40:18 Speaker_01
There have been repeat attempts to cancel me that have failed. Okay, well, so why don't you tell me and everybody else, first of all, why you're, what would you say? Why you so richly deserve cancelling. That's the first issue.

00:40:34 Speaker_01
And then the next issue, which is of equal importance, is how you've managed to not have that happen. Because that's actually really hard.

00:40:43 Speaker_01
So, because if people try to cancel you, especially given the things that you've researched and have insisted upon and said, if people try to cancel you, there's an overwhelming probability in academia in particular that that will be successful.

00:41:00 Speaker_01
So, let's start by talking about the sorts of things that you've been pointing to in Well, in academia in general, and then more specifically in psychology and social psychology.

00:41:12 Speaker_00
Sure. There are probably too many of these attempts for me to go through, so I'm going to pick one. Yeah, pick the cream of the crop. This is probably the cream of the crop. Okay. It is...

00:41:27 Speaker_00
I refer to, so I have a very active sub-sac site, Unsafe Science, and I have several posts on this. You can find it under the POPS fiasco racist mule trope. There's a whole series on this. Okay, so what is POPS?

00:41:44 Speaker_00
POPS is Perspectives on Psych Science, one of the very prestigious journals within the field of psychology for publishing reviews and commentaries and the like.

00:41:55 Speaker_00
The short version is that I was invited by the editor to do a commentary on a main paper that was critical.

00:42:10 Speaker_00
The main paper by a psychologist named Hommel, Bernard Hommel, was critical of prior work in psychology advocating for diversity in a variety of ways.

00:42:25 Speaker_00
The nature of his critique was that much of the rhetoric in psychological scholarship around diversity was narrowly focused on, and the terms are constantly changing, underrepresented, minority, minoritized, disadvantaged, oppressed groups.

00:42:47 Speaker_00
and that from a scientific standpoint... Intersectionally... Yeah, yeah, right, exactly. That's right. And so... Intersectionally deprived. And there was a recent article which argued that on scientific grounds, we need to do exactly that.

00:43:03 Speaker_00
Hummel's critique was that, was really multiple, but two of his key points were that while there are some types of things, it's irrelevant, diversity is irrelevant for certain kind of theoretical scientific tests,

00:43:16 Speaker_00
And then the other point is that if diversity matters, it matters for scientific purposes, it matters extremely broadly, and it's not restricted to underrepresented groups.

00:43:27 Speaker_00
And a very simple example would be if you would compare a study based on undergraduate psychology students versus one based on a nationally representative sample, the research based on the nationally representative sample is going to be broader and more generalizable and more credible.

00:43:45 Speaker_00
A nationally representative sample represents the population. It's not focused entirely on any subset of the population. That would be a very simple example of Hummel's point. I was asked to do a commentary. I did.

00:43:58 Speaker_01
Okay, there's a distinction there too that we should draw.

00:44:03 Speaker_01
Clearly, it's the case that if you want to draw generalizable conclusions about human beings from a study, that the study participants should be a randomly selected and representative sample of the population to whom you're

00:44:17 Speaker_01
attempting to generalize, obviously, because otherwise it doesn't generalize. That's very different than making the case that underrepresented groups should be preferentially hired or employed or promoted or specified.

00:44:33 Speaker_00
Completely different. Completely different. That was sort of part of Hummel's critique. But I guess, so again, the editor invited me to publish a commentary on this exchange, and

00:44:47 Speaker_00
The title of my commentary was, is, it eventually got published, is Diversity is Diverse. Because there's lots of different kinds of diversity.

00:44:56 Speaker_00
And if we're arguing for diversity on scientific grounds, then what the science needs to be is fully representative of the, whether it's the participants, or the topics, or it goes way beyond

00:45:12 Speaker_00
I mean, oppression is a part of that and shouldn't be excluded, but it's only one piece of that. So I basically was in agreement with Hummel's critique and augmented it. As part of that, I critiqued

00:45:28 Speaker_00
progressive academic rhetoric around diversity as disingenuous and hypocritical. And the way I framed that, the way I captured it, was using a quote from Fiddler on the Roof.

00:45:43 Speaker_00
So in Fiddler on the Roof, which is what early 20th century Jewish life in the

00:45:49 Speaker_01
One of the great movies of all time.

00:45:51 Speaker_00
Everyone should watch it. Probably its most famous song is Tradition, which is about the importance of tradition and keeping the community together. But then there were exceptions.

00:46:01 Speaker_00
So there's an interlude in the song Tradition where the villagers get into an argument because one chimes in, there was a time he sold him a horse but delivered a mule. And I use that to frame my discussion of progressive disingenuousness.

00:46:25 Speaker_00
They all disintegrate into fractions in the middle of this song about unity when that comes up. When that comes up, that's right. That's right.

00:46:33 Speaker_00
And I argued in this paper that the reason that's a good metaphor for progressive rhetoric around diversity is that diversity, you know, superficially it sounds good to a lot of people, right? Because who doesn't want to be included?

00:46:49 Speaker_00
No matter what group you're a member of, the idea that someone is advocating for diversity, you know, it's kind of appealing.

00:46:58 Speaker_01
So for example... Yes, with two seconds of thought, it's a positive thing.

00:47:02 Speaker_00
Yes, with two seconds of thought, it's a positive thing.

00:47:04 Speaker_01
Or that people should be free of...

00:47:06 Speaker_00
arbitrary exclusion. Yeah, of arbitrary exclusion. That's right. That's right.

00:47:10 Speaker_00
And for example, one thing one might think if one had a little bit of knowledge is that, especially in the social sciences and humanities, but really in academia writ large, there's hardly anyone who is not left of center.

00:47:24 Speaker_00
I mean, the range goes from sort of center left to the far, far left. I have a

00:47:30 Speaker_01
Former, and that's very well documented.

00:47:32 Speaker_00
No one disagrees with that claim. Well, so, Nate Honeycutt, my former student, he's now a research scientist at FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, did a dissertation on this.

00:47:44 Speaker_00
He surveyed almost 2,000 faculty nationwide at top colleges and universities and found that

00:47:55 Speaker_00
40% self-identified, not just as on the left, the amount on the left was about 90, 95%, but 40% self-identified as radicals, activists, Marxists, or socialists. Yeah. So this is the extreme left. This is no longer just like Democrats or liberals.

00:48:16 Speaker_00
This is nearly half on the far left. And that was a sample of how many people? It's almost 2,000. Yeah.

00:48:23 Speaker_01
How many faculty members at colleges and universities do you suppose there are in the United States, approximately? Do you have any idea?

00:48:32 Speaker_00
I have looked into this. It's hundreds of thousands. I don't know the number. Okay, so let's assume 200,000.

00:48:37 Speaker_01
So that means there's 80,000 academic activists who are being employed full-time in the United States.

00:48:46 Speaker_00
I don't know if you could go that far because he looked at the top colleges and universities. If you wanted to generalize to all colleges and universities, you would have to include community colleges and primarily liberal arts.

00:48:58 Speaker_01
Do you think they'd be less? I don't know. Biased?

00:49:03 Speaker_00
OK, we don't know. I don't know.

00:49:05 Speaker_01
OK, so it's not 80,000, but it could easily be 50,000. Yes, yes, yes. OK, so that's a number I want to return to. OK, OK. Yeah, because there's implications.

00:49:15 Speaker_00
So one might think, if someone is advocating for diversity, given the extreme political skew and given the extent to which academia deals with politicized topics, that there would be an embrace of people, an attempt to bring into academia

00:49:31 Speaker_00
professors, researchers, scholars, teachers from across the political spectrum. That has never gotten any traction in academia. And in fact, it's gone in the complete opposite direction.

00:49:40 Speaker_00
If you go back 50, 60 years, I think it's fair to describe the way academia has functioned is to produce a slow-moving purge of conservatives and even people center and libertarians from its ranks. Yeah.

00:49:54 Speaker_00
My point in this commentary was using things like that as examples of the disingenuousness of progressive rhetoric around diversity, that it wasn't really diversity in the broadest sense, it was a very narrow— See, that's actually the fundamental flaw of intersectionality, is intersectionality devolves into combinatorial explosion almost immediately, right?

00:50:21 Speaker_01
once you start combining the categories of oppression, you don't have to make, your list of combinations, black, women, gay, et cetera, every time you add another variable to that multiplicative list, you decrease the pool of people that occupy that list radically, right?

00:50:41 Speaker_01
But there's also an infinite, there's literally an indefinite, this is your point, an indefinite number of potentially relevant group categories.

00:50:51 Speaker_01
So how in the world are you going to ensure that every possible combination of every possible group category is, you can't even measure it, much less ensure it. Yeah, you can't do that.

00:51:03 Speaker_01
Right, so there's this underlying insistence, which you're pointing to, I believe, that there are privileged categories of oppressed people, right? And it's a weird thing, right? It's like, why is it that it's race? and sex.

00:51:18 Speaker_01
And you might think, well, those are the most obvious differences between people, and maybe you can make that case.

00:51:23 Speaker_01
But then it's also gender, which is a very weird insistence, because whether the idea of gender is valid, I don't think the idea of gender is a valid idea at all. I think it's super

00:51:35 Speaker_01
It's, what would you say, it's a warped, misconceptualization of everything that's captured by temperament, much more accurately and precisely. We can talk about that, but also sexual orientation.

00:51:47 Speaker_01
I can't see at all why that would emerge as a privileged category of oppression alongside something like sex. Like it could, but it's not obvious why.

00:51:56 Speaker_01
Okay, so you're pointing some of, and then you said, well, there's important elements of diversity, especially intellectually. adequate distribution of political or ethical views across the spectrum that's completely off the table.

00:52:12 Speaker_01
Yeah, it's completely off the table.

00:52:13 Speaker_00
It's like rejected. It's worse than off the table. So that was my paper.

00:52:22 Speaker_00
There's more to the story than this, but to keep this succinct, eventually what happened was almost 1,400 academics, probably mostly psychologists, signed an open letter denouncing So my paper was one of several commentaries.

00:52:46 Speaker_00
All of the commentaries were critical of this oppression framing of diversity. All of them? All of them were. And this was in P.O.P.S.? It was in Perspectives on Psych Science, yes.

00:52:57 Speaker_01
Okay, so I just want to provide people some background on this and correct me if I get any of this wrong. Scientists publish in research journals and they generally publish articles of two types.

00:53:09 Speaker_01
One type would be a research study, an actual experiment, let's say, or a sequence of experiments. And the other, I guess there's two other types, there's reviews and there's commentaries.

00:53:22 Speaker_01
And then there's a variety of different journals that scientists publish in, and some of those cover all scientific topics, science and nature. The world's premier scientific journals used to do that before they became woke institutions.

00:53:37 Speaker_01
And then there are specialized journals that cover fields like psychology, and then there are sub-specialized journals. the less specialized the journal, all things considered, the more prestigious it is. Anyways, that's where scientists publish.

00:53:53 Speaker_01
And they do publish commentaries on each other's material, especially if it's a review of something contentious or something that's emerging in a field.

00:54:01 Speaker_01
And now, this journal, Perspectives on Psychological Science, there's also an interesting backstory here because that's an American Psychological Society journal. Okay, so there's two major

00:54:13 Speaker_01
organizations for psychologists, especially research-oriented psychologists in North America.

00:54:20 Speaker_01
There's the American Psychological Association, which has its journals, and then a newer organization, which is now a couple of decades old, American Psychological Society.

00:54:30 Speaker_01
And the American Psychological Society was actually set up, at least in part, because the American Psychological Association

00:54:38 Speaker_01
had started to become ideologically dominated, particularly in the leftist and progressive direction, and that that was having an arguably negative effect on research, reliability, accuracy, and probability of publication.

00:54:53 Speaker_01
That was set up 25... Okay, so that's a little off kilter. Okay, okay.

00:54:57 Speaker_00
Yes, I do know this history. Okay, okay. In the first place, APS started out as the American Psychological Society. They changed their name to the Association for Psychological Science in an attempt to be broader.

00:55:10 Speaker_00
And what triggered the breakaway of APS from APA in the 90s, maybe, this was? 90s, yeah, I think so. Yeah. Wasn't political. It was the scientists who formed APS believed that APA was too focused on clinical practice and practitioner issues. Right.

00:55:34 Speaker_00
And it was becoming unscientific, but not because of the politics.

00:55:38 Speaker_01
Well, OK, so, yeah, yeah, yeah. Fair enough. See, I was watching that happen because I knew some of the people who were setting up the APS at the time.

00:55:48 Speaker_01
And my sense, though, also was that part of the reason that the APA was tilting in a more and more clinical direction was because there was an underlying political ethos that was increasingly skeptical of science as the privileged mode of obtaining valid

00:56:06 Speaker_01
Yeah, I think that's fair.

00:56:07 Speaker_00
I think that's fair.

00:56:08 Speaker_01
Yes. Yes. So the proximal cause was the overemphasis on the clinical.

00:56:14 Speaker_00
Yes.

00:56:14 Speaker_01
But you know, it's also the case that, as you've seen, is that certainly the clinical psychology has, and the whole therapeutic enterprise, has taken a cataclysmic turn towards the woke direction in the last, especially in the last 10 years. Yeah.

00:56:30 Speaker_01
It's been absolutely devastating. And I don't know, is social psychology I think you could probably say the same thing about social psychology. Maybe you could say, maybe that's even worse. Anyways, we can get into that.

00:56:42 Speaker_00
Well, it's probably worse politically, but it's probably not worse practically because social psychologists don't really, aren't responsible for helping anybody get on with their lives. I mean, they're responsible for teaching and students and things.

00:56:54 Speaker_00
They're not, typically, they're not- They are responsible for implicit bias, typically. You are going to get me distracted. You started by asking me to tell the story of my cancellation attack. Let's continue with that.

00:57:07 Speaker_00
Okay, so now there's 1,400 people who write a letter. Yes, declaring all of us, me as well as the other commentators, we're all racists. The editor should be fired and our articles should be taken down.

00:57:23 Speaker_01
Right, so I presume that these 1,400 are a subset of the 50,000 activists. Yes, right. I'm curious about the 1,400 too, because you often see legacy media headline news that 1,400 scientists have signed some petitions.

00:57:40 Speaker_01
But then when you look into it, you know, it's often I know the distinction between graduate student and, let's say, full-fledged scientist is murky. But part of the issue is always, well, exactly who were these 1,400 people, right?

00:57:55 Speaker_01
And out from under which rocks did they climb? So who were the 1,400? Like, roughly speaking, who were these people?

00:58:04 Speaker_00
It was 1,400. I mean, I didn't recognize many of the names. But if you assume the first five or ten names are the likely organizers, those were all well-established psychologists, especially social psychologists. Okay, social. Okay, okay.

00:58:18 Speaker_00
Yeah, they were social psychologists. So you got a backlash from... A huge backlash. And part of the accusation, for me in particular, was that by using this...

00:58:28 Speaker_00
line from Fiddler on the Roof, there was a time he sold him a horse but delivered a mule, as a frame for progressive disingenuousness around diversity, I was comparing Black people to mules.

00:58:41 Speaker_01
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I see. I see.

00:58:43 Speaker_00
And so that drove... That was your subtext, wasn't it? I was explicit in part of the denunciation. Right.

00:58:50 Speaker_01
Right.

00:58:51 Speaker_00
And so... it was an immediate firestorm. This was when? What year did this happen? Oh, yeah. OK. So this is very new. Actually, part of this back story is very interesting.

00:59:04 Speaker_00
The editor of the journal at the time is a European psychologist named Klaus Fiedler. Klaus Fiedler is very accomplished. He has unbelievably honored hundreds of journal articles, multiple editorships and awards. He was the editor overseeing all this.

00:59:24 Speaker_00
And my and the other commentaries that he eventually accepted started out as simple reviews. So when Hommel submitted his paper, it was subjected to peer review. I was one of the peer reviewers, so was one of the other.

00:59:41 Speaker_00
Fiedler so liked the reviews that he asked all of us to scale them up to full-length articles.

00:59:50 Speaker_01
scientists publish their research findings and their reviews of the literature in scientific journals and it's one of the ways that the quality of these articles is vetted is by submitting the manuscripts before they're published to

01:00:07 Speaker_01
Well, first of all, the editor reviews them to see if they're even vaguely possibly suitable for publication in that particular journal on the basis of, let's say, topic and quality and apparent integrity of research.

01:00:21 Speaker_01
Then they're sent out to experts in that area, multiple experts.

01:00:27 Speaker_01
for analysis and that's part of the quality control process and that's worked that worked pretty well up until about 2015 I would say or maybe even spectacularly well all things considered so that's the peer review process and

01:00:44 Speaker_01
What happened in this case was the peer reviews of this particular article were of sufficient quality so that the editor decided that they might... They might turn into stand-alone pieces with some development.

01:00:58 Speaker_00
But I warned Fiedler, the editor, in my review before...

01:01:02 Speaker_00
anyone had the idea that a version of my review would get published, that if he accepted Hommel's critique of the way in which psychologists write and think about diversity, what they've been advocating with respect to diversity, that he would be at heightened risk of people coming after him, demanding the papers be retracted, and coming after his job.

01:01:23 Speaker_00
This is in my review.

01:01:26 Speaker_01
And Jordan, that is exactly... Was that included when it was published, or was that... I don't remember.

01:01:32 Speaker_00
I'd have to go back. I think I may have taken it out, because it wasn't really appropriate, because the commentary wasn't... It was about the exchange. It wasn't a message to the editor. Fine. I mean, it's not necessarily the case that it would stick.

01:01:47 Speaker_00
Yeah. So, Firestorm. APS, the executive director committee of APS, whatever that group is, of committee, put an immediate kibosh on this. It was going to be all published as a... as a discussion forum.

01:02:07 Speaker_00
That's how Fiedler framed it, as a discussion forum about diversity issues. The immediate halt— Okay, who's they? It's the officers of the Association for Psychological

01:02:22 Speaker_01
Okay, so now they're broadly overseeing the group of journals that publish under their aegis. Yes, that's right. Okay, but they generally don't have an editorial say.

01:02:31 Speaker_00
No, they don't. And shouldn't. And shouldn't, right. But the editor is, to some extent, beholden. I mean, that's who he's working for.

01:02:40 Speaker_01
Right, but it's still the case that generally they don't do such things. Yeah, they don't do this, right. Partly because often,

01:02:48 Speaker_01
Well, they don't have the specialized expertise, at least in part, which is partly why they hire the editors to begin with, who then they give pretty much carte blanche. Yes, right. As they should, because that's part of academic freedom. That's right.

01:03:01 Speaker_01
Right. Yes. Okay, but they decided that they were not going to proceed with the publication.

01:03:05 Speaker_00
Well, so the open letter had two main demands. They weren't even required, they were demands. That Fiedler be fired and the papers be retracted.

01:03:16 Speaker_01
Okay.

01:03:17 Speaker_00
They conducted what looked to me, and really to all of us involved, like a kangaroo court, you know, into what happened. They concluded that Fiedler had somehow violated editorial ethics and norms, and— Which is a serious accusation. Yes.

01:03:37 Speaker_00
Like a career-ending accusation, if it's true. Yes. Well, he's had a very nice career since, so it did not succeed— Well, that's good, but that doesn't—

01:03:48 Speaker_01
what detract from the seriousness of the allegation. The fact that he was able to successfully... Yes.

01:03:54 Speaker_00
...wend his way through the thicket. Yes, exactly. That's right. So, he was ousted almost immediately. And then the papers, mine included, that were part of Fiedler's discussion forum... And that had been published.

01:04:07 Speaker_00
They had been accepted, but not published. I see.

01:04:09 Speaker_01
Okay, okay.

01:04:10 Speaker_00
They had been accepted, but not published. That's right.

01:04:11 Speaker_01
So, how the hell did they... complainants get access to the papers? Like, how did they know what the papers were if they hadn't been published?

01:04:20 Speaker_00
Someone must have, you know, maybe through the... The editorial process is largely online, so I'm sure they could have accessed the papers through the online editorial process. I'm sure they could have asked Fiedler for the papers.

01:04:33 Speaker_00
Had they asked us for the papers, I would have... Well, they weren't being secret. They weren't secret. Yeah, they weren't secret, yeah. I mean, people loved publishing their papers so that people could read them.

01:04:40 Speaker_01
I was just curious because it's strange that A brouhaha of that sort would emerge prior to publication, but there was quasi-publication.

01:04:50 Speaker_00
Yeah, right, exactly. It was accepted, but not published. So they ousted him almost immediately, and then the papers, they brought in two special editors to figure out what to do with the papers accepted as part of the discussion forum.

01:05:06 Speaker_00
And who were these special editors and what made them special? Well, there was Samin Vazir and E.J. Wagenmachers. And both of them, I think Samin is now the head editor at Psychological Science.

01:05:21 Speaker_00
So they both have had long careers advocating with some success for upgrading the quality and credibility and rigor of psychological science. They both have made important contributions that way. And so I think that's why they were brought in.

01:05:39 Speaker_00
They had a certain cachet as able to figure out what to do. I think that's what the APS directory believed.

01:05:47 Speaker_01
On what grounds do you think this investigation was How was the progression of this investigation justified?

01:05:56 Speaker_01
I mean, there's no established precedent in the scientific community for reevaluating an editorial decision based on political objection, right? We'll reevaluate if 500 people sign a petition.

01:06:12 Speaker_01
This isn't the domain of rule or principle or tradition, right? So what's the fear here, do you think? These 1,400 people signed this petition, which is something that takes like two seconds and costs you nothing and has no risk to you whatsoever.

01:06:28 Speaker_01
And so it's not an ethical statement of any profundity unless you're an activist. So what was it, do you think, that raised people's hackles about the mere fact that these complaints had been raised? To this second, I don't really know.

01:06:43 Speaker_00
Like, from their perspective... Are you willing to speculate? Well, so... Sure. The... The main object of Hummel's critique was a... black or biracial social psychologist at Stanford, Stephen Roberts, and Roberts denounced the whole process as racist.

01:07:15 Speaker_00
Publicly. Okay, okay. Publicly. And I do think that— On what grounds?

01:07:23 Speaker_01
The mere fact of questioning the diversity agenda constitutes racism.

01:07:28 Speaker_00
He probably had three main grounds. That was one of them, absolutely. You know, you criticize this, this shows that racism is pervasive throughout psychology. That would be one grounds.

01:07:41 Speaker_00
Second ground was my use of this, me comparing blacks to mules, with, you know, there was the time he sold them a horse and delivered a mule.

01:07:49 Speaker_00
And then the third was, there was a considerable, so Fiedler offered... Kind of missing the point of that analogy. I know, yeah, right.

01:07:57 Speaker_00
Fiedler offered Roberts the opportunity to respond to the full set of papers which were supporting, were generally supporting, Hommel's critique which was really about diversity in general, but its jumping-off point was a prior paper by Roberts.

01:08:16 Speaker_00
Okay, got it. But it gave Roberts a chance to reply to the critiques. But there was a considerable back-and-forth between Roberts and Fiedler about whether, when, and how to publish Roberts' response. Okay.

01:08:35 Speaker_00
Feedler was probably kind of a pain in the ass, but in my experience, editors, I don't know how many times, I don't have enough fingers and toes to count the number of times I have subjectively experienced editors' comments as pains in the ass.

01:08:51 Speaker_01
But... One, at least once per paper submitted.

01:08:56 Speaker_00
Yeah, yeah, yeah, right? But whatever. So, but those were his grounds for denouncing all of us as racist. Fiedler made his life difficult.

01:09:05 Speaker_00
This whole critique of diversity is a testament to white supremacy pervasive in psychology and me comparing black people to mules. Yeah, okay, got it. Right, that was the grounds. And you asked me to speculate.

01:09:18 Speaker_00
I have no, I don't have, I have at best very circumstantial evidence. I may not even have circumstantial evidence. I strongly suspect, I would really like to test this in the lab or in surveys, that liberals, especially white liberals,

01:09:32 Speaker_00
are so racked with guilt and shame over the bona fide history of white supremacy and discrimination and oppression in the United States, in Europe, and especially in the UK, it's more about colonialism, are so racked with guilt that there is a vulnerability to just believing

01:09:52 Speaker_00
anything a person from one of these oppressed, stigmatized groups says denouncing others as that kind of thing.

01:10:00 Speaker_01
Yeah, well, it's a very quick and easy way to signify the fact that you're not part of the oppressor camp. That's right, that's right. Yes, well that, has no one, has that not been formally tested as a hypothesis? If it has, I don't know, I don't know.

01:10:10 Speaker_00
Well, it needs to be, it definitely needs to be. I agree, it totally needs to be, yes.

01:10:12 Speaker_01
Well, that's something like, it's something like, from more broadly speaking, is that are there, It's a mechanism of gaming the reputation domain, right?

01:10:25 Speaker_01
Because obviously our reputations are probably, arguably, the most valuable commodity, so to speak, that we possess. system of value is susceptible to gaming in a variety of ways.

01:10:41 Speaker_01
And one way of gaming the reputational game is to make claims of reputational virtue that are risk-free, broad, immediate, and cost-free. And for me, if you're accused of something, and I can say, accused of transgressing against

01:11:00 Speaker_01
a group towards whom I feel guilt, I can signify my valor as a moral agent by also denouncing you. And it cost me nothing, which is a big problem. It's like, maybe it's the problem of our time. It's a very big problem. It's a huge problem.

01:11:17 Speaker_01
Especially now, because there's something else that's happened. groups of denunciators can get together with much greater ease than they ever could. And the effort necessary to make a denunciation has plummeted to zero.

01:11:35 Speaker_01
And the consequences of making a false denunciation are also zero. This is not good. It's like denunciation firestorm time. And that's certainly happened.

01:11:48 Speaker_00
I mostly agree, certainly in the short term, the personal consequences of engaging in this sort of denunciation behavior are non-existent. But the consequences are not non-existent.

01:12:06 Speaker_00
The credibility and trust and faith in academia has been in decline for a very long time. People hate this kind of stuff.

01:12:14 Speaker_01
Yeah, well, just because something's advantageous for some people in the short run does not mean that it's good for the whole game in the medium to long run. That's for sure. Yes, that's right. That's exactly that.

01:12:25 Speaker_01
Well, that's actually, I think, in some ways, the definition of an impulsive moral error. Like, if it accrues benefit to you in the short run, but does you in in the medium run, that's not a very wise strategy, right?

01:12:36 Speaker_01
And that's what impulsive people do all the time. So, right, right. That's even the definition of what constitutes a temptation.

01:12:45 Speaker_00
I was recently listening to your interview for this podcast with Keith Campbell on narcissism.

01:12:52 Speaker_01
Yes.

01:12:53 Speaker_00
And that was one of the things you talked about, this sort of impulse control and short-term benefits versus long-term benefits, especially regarding social relations, right? Yeah, yeah. Reputation's a long-term game. It's a long-term game.

01:13:07 Speaker_00
And there has been emerging evidence that people high in left-wing authoritarianism, sort of extreme— Now that we all agree that that exists, which only started in 2016. I know, I know. That's the whole back story, right? That's for sure.

01:13:24 Speaker_00
But it's correlated with narcissism. And that this pleasure that people on this sort of cancel culture that has emerged, I mean, the right is not immune to cancel culture type activities, but it emerged primarily originally on the left.

01:13:42 Speaker_01
Any place infiltrated by narcissists is going to be susceptible to exactly, and narcissists will use whatever political stance gains them the most immediate credibility, completely independent of the validity of the ideological stance.

01:13:56 Speaker_01
We'll get back to the story right away. See, one of the things I've observed, this is very interesting, because I've talked to a lot of moderate progressives, let's say, or actually even genuine liberals within the

01:14:10 Speaker_01
Democrat, Congressman and Senators, many of them. And I've been struck by one thing, and I'm curious about what you think about this.

01:14:19 Speaker_01
We know that a tilt towards empathy, so agreeableness, trade agreeableness, a tilt tilts you in a liberal direction and maybe in a progressive direction. And there are concomitants of being more agreeable on the personality side.

01:14:32 Speaker_01
But I think one of them is that The moderates that I've talked to always denied the existence of the pathological radicals on the left. And I've really thought, I mean, this is to a man for a moment. Yeah, yeah.

01:14:47 Speaker_01
And I think what it is, I think it has something to do with the unwillingness or inability of the more liberal types to have imagination for evil. Like, I would make the case that most criminals

01:15:04 Speaker_01
You could validly interpret most criminals, whose criminal history is sporadic and short, as victims. They've come from abusive families, alcoholic families, often multi-generationally antisocial families, etc. But there's a subset of criminals.

01:15:27 Speaker_01
It's 1% of the criminals, 65% of the crimes. There's a subset of criminals who are not victims. They are really monsters. And I don't think there's any imagination for the monstrous in among the compassionate left. It's all victims.

01:15:40 Speaker_01
It doesn't matter how egregious the crime. Now, I would have that's something I would have tested as a social psychologist if I still had an active research lab, which I don't.

01:15:51 Speaker_01
But the problem with what we know that we know from simulations that networks of cooperators can establish themselves in a way that's mutually beneficial and productive. But that if a shark is dropped into a tank of cooperators,

01:16:06 Speaker_01
then the shark takes everything. So the problem with being agreeable and cooperative is that the monsters can get you. And if you're temperamentally tilted towards denying the existence of the monster so much the worse.

01:16:20 Speaker_01
Now I made that case because you talked about the relationship between narcissism and left-wing authoritarianism. I mean, narcissism shades into sadism as well. And so this is a very big problem, especially with online denunciation.

01:16:34 Speaker_01
Okay, so back to 2022. Now there's, debate about whether these papers are gonna proceed to publication. And there's allegations made against the people who wrote the reviews.

01:16:46 Speaker_00
Yes, absolutely. We're all racists, and the whole thing was racist, and an abuse of editorial power, and it's all these accusations. Right, and the editor loses his position. He loses his position, and these two special editors are brought in.

01:16:58 Speaker_00
Negotiations go on for almost two years. Like, what are they negotiating about? Who's gonna... So, part of Roberts' denunciation

01:17:10 Speaker_00
public denunciation of all of us was he posted the draft of his commentary response that was headed for the discussion forum and the full set of emails he exchanged with Fiedler. about publishing it.

01:17:30 Speaker_00
And those are, you know, those are typically confidential communications between an editor and an author. And so— Or at least typically private. Yes, right. They're typically private. So that—

01:17:46 Speaker_00
That added to the difficulty on the part of the special editors to decide what to do because they didn't want to just publish those. Roberts didn't agree not to at first. Fiedler—they wanted Fiedler's permission

01:18:06 Speaker_00
to publish the correspondence, he wouldn't grant it.

01:18:10 Speaker_01
So why did Smith have such an outsized say in all this? Like, that isn't how the scientific process generally works. So the once APS

01:18:22 Speaker_00
blew up the journal by firing Fiedler. So there was no- Right, right, which is like an admission of fault. And about two-thirds of the editorial board resigned when he was ousted. That was protest resignation.

01:18:38 Speaker_00
Yeah, I don't know whether it was protest, we know they resigned, whether it was protest or not.

01:18:44 Speaker_01
So they were- Maybe they also thought it was trouble they didn't need.

01:18:47 Speaker_00
Yeah, right.

01:18:48 Speaker_01
I mean, these are generally, if you're- When you're working for a scientific journal, you're not doing it for the money, right? It's a lot of work. And the editors... Was he paid? Was that his full-time job?

01:19:00 Speaker_01
It was not his full-time job, and I don't know whether he was paid. Right, right. Okay, so that just illustrates the point, is that people are doing this because that's actually what you do as a scientist.

01:19:09 Speaker_01
There's not a lot of... You know, it's a prestigious position, and you meet people. You have a certain say over the direction the field might go.

01:19:17 Speaker_01
And those are perks, but generally people do this like they do peer review because it's part of the tradition of scientific activity. Right, right, right. That's right.

01:19:29 Speaker_01
So you can see why people might bail out if it was going to just be nothing but reputation catastrophe. Exactly right.

01:19:35 Speaker_01
Because they'd be thinking, why the hell am I going to expose myself to this dismal risk when it's already hard and there's very little upside?

01:19:44 Speaker_00
Right, exactly, right, okay. So the journal was a mess for a long time, and these editors, and there was this exchange between the editors, Roberts, Fiedler, and the other contributors, myself and the other contributors.

01:20:01 Speaker_00
about whether and when to publish it. And again, this went on for almost two years. So there was first a discussion, we're going to publish it, then there was radio silence, well, it turns out we've run into an obstacle, can we resolve it?

01:20:14 Speaker_00
And it just went on for almost two years. Eventually, that was resolved, and it was all published. It's all published. You know, your original question was framed as, you can't believe I haven't been subject to cancellation. In fact, I have. I have.

01:20:31 Speaker_00
You're then asked, well, how did you survive it? Let me add this little punchline. At the time that all this was happening, my immediate associate dean, so I was chair of the psychology department at Rutgers,

01:20:48 Speaker_00
Rutgers is in the School of Arts and Sciences. The School of Arts and Sciences has a dean. But the School of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers is gigantic. Even as chair, I had very little direct contact with the dean. The dean was doing big deanly things.

01:21:02 Speaker_00
But the department chairs have a lot of contact with an associate chair. So there might be an associate chair for the sciences. Dean? Associate dean, yeah, sorry. Associate dean, yeah, sorry. Associate dean.

01:21:14 Speaker_00
So there'd be an associate dean for math, for STEM, associate dean for social science, and associate dean for humanities. I had a lot to do with the associate dean for social sciences, who was a psychologist from the psychology department.

01:21:28 Speaker_00
Okay, so I never actually had this conversation exactly with him, but I'm pretty sure he knew about the whole thing. A year, so at the end of my term, so this is now 2023, I go on sabbatical.

01:21:42 Speaker_00
Remember, this event occurred, the POPS event occurred in 2022. It's not till almost two years later that the stuff is published. So I complete my term as department chair 2022. 2022, 23, I go on sabbatical. It's still not published.

01:21:57 Speaker_00
And then at the end of that sabbatical term, the associate dean approaches me. with an offer to chair the anthropology department. Okay, so this is very weird. Yeah, definitely. It's very weird.

01:22:13 Speaker_00
There was an internal political snafu, which is beyond the scope of this discussion. and they couldn't appoint an internal chair, and they wanted an external, you know, the department needed a chair.

01:22:26 Speaker_00
The dean's office had a lot of faith and confidence in my ability.

01:22:32 Speaker_01
Despite this, despite the... Because of it.

01:22:35 Speaker_00
One of the things they said to me was, you know, this is going to be a difficult situation because the department is not going to be happy about having an outside chair imposed on them, but we know you have a thick skin. Wow.

01:22:49 Speaker_00
And I parlayed that into a very large raise. Jordan, it was one of the best things I've ever done. So not only did I escape cancellation, I parlayed it into an improvement in the quality of— Well, this is a good thing for people to know, too.

01:23:06 Speaker_01
You know, if you've watched my podcast, you know because I say this all the time that mythologically speaking, that every treasure has a dragon, right? And that's a representation of the world because the world is full of threat and opportunity.

01:23:22 Speaker_01
And the co-association of the dragon and the treasure is a mythological trope indicating that there's opportunity where there's peril. But there's a corollary to that, which is a very interesting one, which is where there's peril, there's opportunity.

01:23:40 Speaker_01
And so you might think when something negative happens to you, let's say on the social side, that you become the brunt of a cancellation attempt, you might think, oh my God, my life's over. It's like, yeah, that's one possible outcome.

01:23:53 Speaker_01
That's the same outcome as, you know, ending up as dragon toast, let's say. But the other outcome is that you find the treasure that's associated with the dragon, and that can definitely happen. And that's a good thing to know because it means that

01:24:07 Speaker_01
when things become shaky around you, one of the things you can validly ask yourself is, there's something positive lurking here if I had the wisdom to see it and the, what would you say, the capacity for transformation necessary to allow the challenge to change me.

01:24:26 Speaker_01
Yeah, that's right.

01:24:27 Speaker_00
Jordan, I wouldn't wish that, at the time that was happening, it was horrible. I wouldn't wish it on anyone. In hindsight, it has made me a better person, and I wouldn't undo it now if I could.

01:24:43 Speaker_01
Well, you know what Nietzsche said, if it doesn't kill you, it makes you stronger. Now, unfortunately, there's an if. Well, seriously, right? Yes. And the if is that the dragon is real. It's not a game.

01:24:56 Speaker_00
Yeah.

01:24:56 Speaker_00
Well, no, FIRE, the same outfit, Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, keeps a faculty under FIRE database of faculty who have been subject, usually to mobs, sometimes administrative investigations, seeking to punish them for what should have been legitimate academic speech protected by academic freedom or even free speech.

01:25:17 Speaker_00
At US state colleges, Subject to the First Amendment, which means they shouldn't be in the business. However, say pathetically.

01:25:25 Speaker_00
Well, yeah Well, yeah, but they have documented that hundreds of faculty have been fired for what should have been legitimately a protected speech so your point about the whole training conservatives well, I will Or liberals for that matter.

01:25:39 Speaker_00
Your metaphor about the dragon is dead on. That there's no guarantee, you know, people have lost their livelihoods running into these dragons. So that's not... I mean, I've been fortunate in that way.

01:25:49 Speaker_01
So there's some concrete recommendations that can be brought out of that too. I would say, like, if you find yourself in serious trouble, this is one of the things I learned about...

01:25:58 Speaker_01
I learned from dealing with very dangerous people in my clinical practice, let's say. Dangerous and unstable people. It's a very bad idea to lie when you're in trouble. It's a seriously bad idea.

01:26:10 Speaker_01
And so, if the mob or the monster comes for you, your best defense is Extremely cautious, plain truth. Now that's very different than trying to, what would you say, strategize and manipulate your way out of a difficult situation.

01:26:28 Speaker_01
It's also very different than apologizing. And my experience on the woke mob cancellation side is, If you lie in your own defense or falsify your speech, you're in serious trouble. And if you apologize, a different mob will just come for you.

01:26:45 Speaker_01
That'll be the post-apology mob that comes for you. It's not a good idea. So, you know, what we've been outlining here is the fact that if you're in serious social peril, there's two outcomes. One is that

01:26:59 Speaker_01
Perversely enough, in retrospect, it might turn out to be an opportunity and one you wouldn't forego now that you know the consequences. That's not impossible, but it's difficult. The other one is, is you're seriously done.

01:27:13 Speaker_01
And so then the question is, what can you do to maximize the possibility of the former and minimize the latter? And those are some things that I know. So, okay, okay. So let's back up a bit then.

01:27:27 Speaker_01
We still haven't exactly described why the cancellation attempts weren't successful for you.

01:27:36 Speaker_01
Now, you said you demonstrated your ability to keep a calm head under fire and that you did that well enough so the university actually recognized that and that turned out to be of substantive benefit to you.

01:27:48 Speaker_01
But we don't know why it was that you maintained a calm head under fire or how you did that without Well, having the reputation damage that was certainly directly implied by the accusation take you out. Like, do you have, was it good fortune?

01:28:06 Speaker_01
Were there things you did right? Like, how do you assess that?

01:28:10 Speaker_00
Yeah, yeah. So that was not my first, as I mentioned at the beginning, this was not my first go around with this kind of thing. It helps to have some experience. It helps to have done some reading.

01:28:23 Speaker_00
People have addressed, there's some good articles and essays out there about what to do when you're subject to these attacks. Some of them have very good, make very good points. And so, about six months ago, I, again, I posted an essay on my sub-sack.

01:28:44 Speaker_00
What's the name of your sub-sack? Unsafe Science. Unsafe Science. It's called my Vita of Denunciation. And it's called my Vita of Denunciation because it goes through several of these sorts of attacks that I have been through.

01:28:58 Speaker_00
And how, first place, it also goes through the tactics. It's a short version. I have a longer version in a different place, but it goes through a short version of how to deal with these attacks.

01:29:09 Speaker_00
So the very first piece is that if you find yourself in the midst of such an attack, Go silent. Go silent. Do not engage. Do not engage with your attackers because nearly all of these cancellation-type attacks are massive, brutal, and short.

01:29:33 Speaker_00
Right, right, right.

01:29:34 Speaker_01
Two weeks.

01:29:35 Speaker_00
Yeah, and most. That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And most.

01:29:38 Speaker_01
And people forget. That's the weird thing, because the present is so large, you're going to panic. Yes. Yeah, yeah. Don't panic. Don't panic. That's right. Don't panic. Don't assume that it's going to be successful. That's right.

01:29:49 Speaker_00
Yeah.

01:29:51 Speaker_01
They might be interested in you today, but they weren't interested in you yesterday, and they probably won't be interested in you tomorrow.

01:29:57 Speaker_00
That's right. As a kid, we used to go to the beach and body surf, and occasionally a wave that was way bigger than you could handle would.

01:30:05 Speaker_00
And there was nothing you could do except let it wash over you and knock you around, and you come out and it washes you on shore, and you're fine. As long as you don't do anything to make it worse. Yeah. Like apologize, for example.

01:30:16 Speaker_00
You know, I would add this. If you genuinely, in your heart of hearts, believe you have done something wrong, then maybe you should apologize. But you should not apologize.

01:30:27 Speaker_01
Let me add something to that. No, not if you genuinely believe it, because you might not be your own best defender. That's why you have a Fifth Amendment. No, seriously. Conscientious, Guilt prone people will accuse themselves.

01:30:43 Speaker_01
So then I would say, if you feel that you've done something wrong, remember the presumption of innocence before provable guilt. Remember that. It applies to you too.

01:30:53 Speaker_01
And then go talk to five or six people that you trust and lay out the argument on both sides and see if they think you're the bad guy. Right.

01:31:01 Speaker_00
That's good. I agree with that. You need that. Yes, that's good. Yeah. Completely on board with that.

01:31:06 Speaker_01
So don't assume that you're morally obligated to apologize even if you think, even if you feel guilty. That's right. Because your guilt feelings are not an unerring indication of your guilt. That's right.

01:31:17 Speaker_01
And may distort how you think about your culpability.

01:31:19 Speaker_00
Yes, definitely. Yeah, no, that's a very good point.

01:31:22 Speaker_01
See, this is why I think, too, the council mob is particularly effective against genuine conservatives. Because genuine conservatives tilt towards higher conscientiousness, and it's very easy to make conscientious people feel guilty. Right, right.

01:31:36 Speaker_01
So that can be weaponized.

01:31:37 Speaker_00
Okay, so go silent.

01:31:39 Speaker_01
Yeah, go silent. You can always apologize in a month, after you've thought it through, if anyone still cares. That's right. Okay, go silent.

01:31:49 Speaker_00
Go silent. Record everything. That's for sure. Everything. Everything. You don't know how you're going to use it. You may use it

01:32:02 Speaker_00
To defend yourself going forward, depending on how things unfold, you may decide, after the wave of the attack passes, that you want to counterattack. Yeah, right. Carefully and strategically. Carefully and strategically.

01:32:20 Speaker_00
And by recording everything, you have the raw material to damn your attackers. Go silent.

01:32:29 Speaker_01
Yeah, that's especially true if someone's interviewing you. Yeah, it's like record all of it. Record all of it.

01:32:35 Speaker_00
Yeah, record all of it. Seek allies. because you may feel alone. Mobs are very good at coming after somebody who seems alone. But if you have networks, support networks, activate those networks.

01:32:55 Speaker_00
If you don't have them and, you know, if you're in the intellectual type of professions, whether it's academia or mainstream media, could be in something else, you probably have a support network. Let them know what's going on.

01:33:08 Speaker_00
My experience has been, at least the kind of networks that I have, people will stand up for you. I mean, I had numbers of people writing essays that got posted in some pretty good places. Real clear politics, I think, was one, right?

01:33:24 Speaker_00
On this Pops fiasco. So, actually, of all places, the Chronicle of Higher Ed did a great, some great reporting on it, and it really kind of damned the mob.

01:33:36 Speaker_01
Right, that's also why you need that time of silence, is to muster your resources. Yes, yes.

01:33:42 Speaker_01
And you could also assume, even if people are nervous in the aftermath of the accusations for two or three days or a week even, they may come to their senses as the,

01:33:55 Speaker_00
temperature drops. Yes, that's right. Yeah, that's absolutely right. And then, right, so go silent, record everything, activate your support networks. And then, again, it depends on the situation.

01:34:09 Speaker_00
It's going to vary from person to person and situation to situation. It depends in part on what your skills and resources are. but then you are ready to either defend yourself and or counterattack.

01:34:23 Speaker_00
And I don't, Jordan, I don't know how many essays I posted on unsafe science surrounding this event. One of them is titled, there is no racist mule trope.

01:34:34 Speaker_00
So the argument, the grounds for denouncing me as a racist for comparing black people to mules was that there was a historical trope of making an equivalence between black people and mules.

01:34:49 Speaker_00
Roberts presented this, and he had one reference to support this, which I was not familiar with. So I tracked it down. That's what you say. Let's see what the article actually says. This article was a really good article.

01:35:08 Speaker_00
What it documented was that there was a historical linkage between Black people and mules because, originally, American Blacks were overwhelmingly in the American South. in the agrarian South.

01:35:22 Speaker_00
And so the mule was a symbol of both the kind of work that was done in the South, this agricultural work, and it was a symbol of the flawed liberation of black people from slavery, because one of the promises that they never delivered on was 40 acres and a mule.

01:35:44 Speaker_00
And even though that was never delivered on, for a very long time until you had the mass migration into the North.

01:35:53 Speaker_00
The Black people living in the American South, you know, aspired to be successful farmers, and getting a mule was one way to have a successful farm.

01:36:03 Speaker_00
And so you would see images, paintings, even, you know, if you go to Southern museums, there's some very famous paintings of Black people in fields with a mule pulling a wagon Or I don't know, you know, like a plow. Yes, right.

01:36:23 Speaker_00
That's very, very common. And in fact, the mule figures fairly largely in African-American folk stories from the American South. So he documents all this, so much so that the mule

01:36:40 Speaker_00
really became a symbol of people who were oppressed and part of the liberation of people who were oppressed, so that after Martin Luther King's assassination, his casket was pulled in a wagon pulled by mules.

01:37:00 Speaker_01
Okay, so given all that, it's less surprising that that speculation might have arisen in relationship to your analogy. Things you find out too late.

01:37:11 Speaker_00
Yes, right, right. But it is ironic because the mule is the symbol of the liberation from the oppression rather than the oppression.

01:37:22 Speaker_01
So let me ask you a question about strategy there too. I've spent a lot of time strategizing with people because that was a big part of my clinical practice. But in terms of silence and then mustering your support network, right?

01:37:44 Speaker_01
And then you said, well, you can start your defense. It's like My sense is that a good offense is a very strong defense, right? Because you can, if you're careful, now, you know, you can defend yourself or you can turn the tables.

01:38:03 Speaker_01
And I would say, if you're turning the tables because you're angry, that's not a good idea because you're going to make mistakes in your strategizing, right? I think you can distinguish the

01:38:14 Speaker_01
the search for justice and truth from the search for revenge by the intermediating role of especially resentment. If you're resentfully angry, your head isn't clear.

01:38:25 Speaker_01
But if you can quell that and you want to establish the truth and you can do that with a certain amount of detachment, then a good defensive strategy is offense. It's like what's actually, you can flip the table, so to speak.

01:38:42 Speaker_01
The problem with a defense is there's something... Well, there's something defensive about it. There's something defensive about it.

01:38:49 Speaker_00
Absolutely, yes.

01:38:49 Speaker_01
Well, I might have made a mistake with your speech, but I didn't. It's like, no, no, you're seriously wrong. Yeah, yeah. And in a manner that's actually detrimental to the cause you purport to be putting forward. Yeah, okay.

01:39:02 Speaker_00
Yeah. Well, so that and some of the prior experiences fueled what my, what was then very early, interests in left-wing authoritarianism and far-left radicalization and its consequences. And so I've been doing all sorts of studies on that.

01:39:29 Speaker_01
All right, look, we have to stop this part of the discussion, even though there's like 50 other things I want to talk to you about, but we'll continue. I'm going to, I think, focus the discussion on The Daily Wire side.

01:39:41 Speaker_01
You guys listening on YouTube know about this, that we do another half an hour there. I think I'm going to talk about

01:39:48 Speaker_01
categorization and implicit bias and delve a little bit more into social psychology's role, for better or worse, in promoting many of the policies, the DEI policies for example, and justifying them hypothetically on scientific grounds.

01:40:05 Speaker_01
I want to delve into that because it's definitely been social psychologists who've been

01:40:10 Speaker_01
particularly interested in the issue of implicit bias, even though to some degree that notion came from the clinical world, including from people like Carl Jung, who were very interested in the idea of complex and implicit association back in the 1920s.

01:40:27 Speaker_01
Anyways, there's a veneer of scientific respectability that's been laid over the diversity, inclusivity, and equity claims, the notion of implicit and systemic bias.

01:40:38 Speaker_01
And that's always bothered me because I think the social psychologists have done a terrible job distinguishing between categorization, which is like the basis of perception itself, bias, because you can't consider categorization bias.

01:40:54 Speaker_01
It's like, that's insane. That's insane, even though the postmodernists really do make that claim.

01:40:59 Speaker_01
And Lee's done work, too, looking at the accuracy of such things as so-called stereotypes, because what's the difference between a stereotype and a category? Like, that is a hard question. You could spend 1,000 years trying to figure that out.

01:41:15 Speaker_01
Anyways, I think that's what we'll delve into if you want to join us on the Daily Wire side. And so thank you very much, sir, for, well, for offering what you know and also your story.

01:41:25 Speaker_01
to the more general public and join us on the Daily World site if you want to continue with the discussion.