The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 506. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim

Episode Date: December 16, 2024

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

So the podcast today took a turn back to the psychological, which is an improvement over the political as far as I'm concerned, generally speaking. Um, likely because the topic of concentration has more long-lasting significance, all things considered. So, in any case, I spoke today with Lee Jussam, and Lee is the distinguished, a distinguished professor of psychology at Rutgers, and he's been the chair there of the Department of Psychology and separately of anthropology, which is a peculiar habit stance that we discuss in the podcast. I was interested in Lee's work because there's a lot of trouble in the field of social psychology. A lot of the claims of the field are not true. Now you got to expect that in scientific inquiry because a lot of the things we believe

are false and the whole reason that we practice as scientists is to correct those falsehoods. And it's also the case that much of what's published is not going to be true because the alternative would be that everything that was published was a discovery that was true and we'd be overwhelmed by novelty so fast That it would be untenable if that ever happened. Lee is one of the rarer social psychologists who's actually a scientist and He's done a lot of interesting and also

Controversial work that's partly how you can tell it's interesting and valid because it also is controversial. One of the things he's established, which is of cardinal importance, is that our perceptions of other people are not mostly biased, right? This is, the contrary claim is rather preposterous, which is that all of the categories that we use to structure our interactions with other people are based on the power distortion of

our perceptions, let's say, which is essentially a 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, but that's a very different claim than that the foundations of our perceptions themselves are indistinguishable from the biases we hold as motivated agents.

And so his work is extremely important. It's core to the culture war that is tearing us apart. So if you're interested in the definition of perception, the relationship between perception and reality, and the analysis of bias in a manner that's credible, then pay attention to this podcast and get things cleared up. So I guess we might as well get right to the point. And the first thing I'm curious about is, and this is something I think that can be

like 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. It was like, I came across that and I thought, what do you mean there's no such thing as left-wing authoritarianism? It's like, that's insane. That's absolutely insane.

And so, 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 have master's, I supervised the master's thesis at that time. It was a very good thesis on left-wing authoritarianism. And, cause we showed that there were statistical clumps

of reliably characterizable left-wing authoritarian beliefs that did in fact associate statistically and that identifiable groups of people with identifiable temperamental proclivities did hold. I really wanted to follow up on that because it was very rich potential source of new information, but my academic career exploded at that point, it became impossible.

So, okay, so. Well, people have taken that ball and run with it. Yeah, yeah, so well, tell us about it. What have you found? Well, okay. How do you, let's start with some definitions. Like what constitutes left wing as opposed to right wing authoritarianism, let's say.

Right, so there are measurement issues across the board, but that is with respect to both left and right wing authoritarianism. 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 nonpartisan authoritarianism scale. It's authoritarianism with a psychological construct rather than a political one. 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. 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 consura. Okay, so that's a very interesting definition, though, because you're pointing to the fact that, 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. But you have to have some beliefs for that to be. I didn't say can't, I said 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 nonpartisan authoritarianism scale.

Based on that idea. Yes, based on that idea. I don't know if she's gonna succeed. Okay, so I'm thinking about that clinically. It's like, 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. 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.

People have done that on the left and it does correlate with left wing authoritarianism. I don't know, you never know for sure the limits of your own knowledge. 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. 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. 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,

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. But I can't provide the sources out there. 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. But okay, but you've been studying it. Okay, so when we looked at 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. And we found the biggest predictor of left wing authoritarianism was low verbal IQ. of clearly authoritarian proclivities. And we found the biggest predictor of left-wing authoritarianism was low-verbal IQ.

It was a walloping predictor, negative.40. Immense predictor. So that's something to, because 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. So then you might say, well, if you lack the capacity for deep verbal critical evaluation,

what apparently moral ideas would appeal to you? 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. That doesn't mean it's the, it doesn't mean that everyone who says that's what they're for are in fact agitating on behalf of that person.

Okay, so back to your research. Yeah, yeah, okay. First of all, let me be clear. 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. We haven't developed the scales. So for left- And do you think there are good scales now for left and right wing authoritarianism? Adequate scales? 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. 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, the sort of statistical assessment of how things hang together, and also validity assessment of their two slightly different, somewhat different scales.

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? And then you wanna 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. You wanna 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. 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. It was shocking! It's like, really? But talk about discovered it. It was shocking. Really? Talk about blind spots. Oh my God. It's like, oh, do you guys miss Mao and Stalin?

I don't know how you missed that. It's like fairly obvious. You're a social psychologist. The biggest pathological social movements of the 20th century had their existence denied for 70 years. Mind boggling. It's mind boggling. It's mind boggling.

I've never recovered from discovery. Yes. It took me like a year to even believe it was true. Okay, so you're using other people's questions. Yes. So what's your approach? 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, as if they were memes, like social media memes, to an online sample, about a thousand people, and asked them how much they liked the cartoons and memes, and which, and we told them to vote for the one, for one, 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, 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. So it was a real world outcome. A real world quasi-behavioral would be promoted rather than just like liking or dislike right?

Okay, so or self report that they believe something. That's right 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. Okay, but but I can describe the two quickly enough the first and a set like the second. But I can describe the two quickly enough. 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.

We just presented the cartoon, which showed a long distance shot of this. In the top panel was 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. People dressed in KKK, whatever. Right, right, right

True nature of American right? Right, okay. Yes, right. Okay. That was one. Yeah, and then the second was an image of a diverse group of people 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.

There was 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. 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. So was that a benevolent left view? Yeah, sort of a benevolent left view. Yes, exactly, right, that's right. 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... Now, did we figure that out? The liberal left doesn't partake of the attitudes of the radical authoritarian leftists. But they're the ones that I also think that the liberal denies. Sort of oblivious. Yes, I think that's true. That is what we found. That's what we found in the study.

I got a research idea that's relevant to this. Well, with regards to these questionnaires, it's something that I wanted to do. The large language models track statistical probability. So you can take those left-wing questionnaire sets and you can ask ChatGPT, here's an item or here's three items, generate 30 more. And it does it. Right, so if you wanted to improve

the statistical reliability of the measures, so you can imagine, take the measures that already exist, put them in clumps of three in ChatGPT, have it expanded out to like 300 items, administer it to a thousand people, and distill it. Because the thing- That's a great idea. This'll speed things up radically,

because the thing about the large language models is, they already have the statistical correlations built in. When you ask ChatGP to generate 40 items that are conceptually like these four, that's what it does. 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. Yeah, so do that. I'm gonna bring this back to Sonja. Sonja's a fan of your podcast, I'm sure she's gonna see this. I'll probably talk to her before, but hi Sonia. We shouldn't be doing this with all the questionnaires. Like it's the same with narcissism.

If you put, see the other thing you could do with chat GPT is you could say, here's 20 items significant of narcissism, okay? 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.

So all the factor structures already built into the chat GPT systems, like all of it. That's great. Yeah, so okay, 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 infrastructure in place.

But I think this would radically speed up the process of, and also make it much more reliable and valid. Yeah, I think that's right. Yeah, yeah, okay. Yeah, we'll have to try it, we'll have to try it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, try it out it, we'll have to try it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Try it out, try it out. Absolutely. Okay, absolutely. All right, so back to, all right,

so now you've got people voting for one comic or the other. Yes, 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 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, 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. And so the questionnaires predicted that?

Yes, yes, yes. Oh, that's good, that's good. Yeah, yeah, it's a great study, so. Another thing you might wanna 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 items are central.

Especially if you saw that pattern across multiple cartoons. Yeah, yeah, okay, okay. Okay. Yeah, so that's one. That's, yeah, we did this kind of thing. Well, how many studies have you done now on left-wing authoritarianism?

Well, it's a lot. We include it in almost everything. And we include measures of left and right-wing authoritarianism in most of. And we include measures of left and right wing authoritarianism in most of the studies we've been confused. So tell us what you found. So 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 headache. And we did it with three different kinds of DEI rhetoric. Yeah, those are probably studies that I'd run across of years. I remember that. Yeah, that's fairly recent and they've made more of a splash than I would have expected. 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.

So you know suicide prevention programs, the kind the government's always running, they make suicide rates go up. Well, because why? Well, you're advertising and normalizing suicide. Right, and you think, well, we're gonna put up a prevention program. 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? 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. 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. 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? What interventions and what was your evidence linking them? Yes, okay, so let me walk through, let me qualify this a little bit. We examined the rhetoric that is common to many DEI intervention. CHAPGPD can do a very good job of that, by the way. Kind of.

The problem is a lot of the materials 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 a lot is not publicly available. So 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. 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. And there are, for race, we used passages from Kendi's How to Be an Anti-Racist and from D'Angelo's White Fragility.

These books were widely required for our colleges. You know, there's sometimes, she's paid $40,000 a session to come in and give her training. So 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. Yeah, okay, okay, fine, fine. So you use that as a validation. You know what, 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.

The control passage in these studies, then two out of the three, was about how to grow corn on the farm. It was completely separate. And this is only a short excerpt of a longer passage. White people, this is the anti-racism. White people raised in Western society are conditioned into a white supremacist worldview.

Racism is the norm, it is not unusual. So this went on for a full paragraph. And it was quotes smoothed together with a little writing by us of Kendi and D'Angelo. Okay, all right. So they then were presented with a very brief scenario 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. 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 in. Was the causal factor.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. What, you know, 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, treating the applicant more unfairly, and that the admissions officer was more biased.

Okay, so I'm gonna put on my devil's advocate hat. Yes. And I'm going to play Robin D'Angelo, despite wearing this Trump badge. And I'm gonna say, well, the effects of institutional racism are so pervasive that they even invaded your experimental material. And the consequence of being exposed to the contents

of my writing, speaking as Robin DiAngelo, 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. Yes, that is probably what DiAngelo would say. Actually, I can tell you a little bit 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. You had to read that into the scenario. And that is the point. How do you know that your own implicit bias didn't stop you from seeing the bias that was there. Because anyone can look at the scenario.

People didn't even have racial information about the admissions officer and the applicant. So you don't even. So you regarded as highly improbable that what they were reading into the situ, that what they were, you regarded as highly probable that they were reading into the situ. Okay, let me ask you regarded as highly probable, that they were reading into the situ. Okay, let me ask you a couple more technical questions.

Okay, 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, 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? Well, it is kind of. So on the narrow issue of how long do the effects we observed in the study last, we didn't study that. Right.

So I have no answer to that. Yeah, of course. Okay. 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, this like reading a single paragraph. Right, right. 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. 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.

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 post-hoc detection of such things as microaggressions, let's say, are radically rewarded by the participants in those ideological systems.

That being even more, that's a more powerful effect. So you got it with weak exposure fundamentally. Okay, so again- And no reward, right? I mean, no pinkage of the social reward. Exactly, exactly. Yeah, yes, yes, exactly. So I would say, the weakness of your intervention

demonstrated the power of the rhetoric. Okay, what did Kendi have to say about this? He described us as racist pseudoscientists. Oh yeah, oh yeah, okay, well that pretty much covers the territory. Did he say why? Or was that unnecessary? You know, that quote.

How are you at wasting money? My sense is that he was particularly good at that. So yeah, university money, counter-productively. Well I think most of his was from actually, what's his name? Jack Dorsey from Twitter. Yeah, I think gave him $10 million. So at least it wasn't state money, right?

Yeah, right, right, right. Okay, well then, we can just let it go. So, okay, okay. Okay, you said that produced quite a splash. Including enhanced probability of being on this podcast, for example. So I'd followed your work for a long time before coming across that.

So what effect has it had? When was the study published, first of all? Well, so, and is it a sequence? Is it a single study? 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, there's little minor differences, but it's

essentially the same pattern of results. They're not published. So these studies are conducted in collaboration with the NCRI. NCRI is the Network Contagion Research Institute. They are a free standing research institute that main 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 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, 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, 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 sort of consistent with what you were talking about earlier about how the left isn't, the reasonable left is in complete denial of the far left. It is literally true that most of the protests were peaceful. 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 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. When you would talk about that, the response was, this is all just right wing. It's yeah, right.

Oh yeah, I talked to moderate Democrats who told me that Antifa was a figment of the right wing imagination. Yes, right. I thought, but you know, there's something weird about that that's very much worth pointing out, I believe, is that we radically underestimate the effect a very small minority of people who are organized can have in destabilizing a society.

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 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. And that's seriously wrong. So this, enter the NCRI.

So 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, not conventional liberals or Democrats, but 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. 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. So this is, you know. That's exactly what you'd expect.

Of course that's going to happen. I know, right. Clearly. Yes. If you believe in criminals. Yeah, right. Right, okay. So, and then, so, an NCR would, in this report,

would then link the increased online activity. You know, there'd be memes like ACAB, all cops and bastards, you know. So there'd be things like that., all cops are bastards. 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.

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

You know, sort of mobilize online using memes and catch phrases and, you know, sort of mobilize online using memes and catchphrases and you know, garner adherence, you know, gain adherence and stuff. 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. Well, that is what they do. I know, right, yes, this doesn't seem far-fetched, right? They can dance in the ashes that way.

Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. The real criminal psychopaths, the short-term guys, the narcissists, they thrive in chaos because their niche is chaos, right? It was, 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.

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. And it was the first time there was any acknowledgement 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, 2012. We did the work over the summer the thing came But what but that report is not published in a peer-reviewed journal and CRI has its own website And they publish these reports kind of like I'm like your studies were what we're yes and no so for as of right now That's where they are. They're available on the NCR. I website Okay, and who did that was a post a postdoc, a doctor, a student? But it was a bunch of all, it was, so it was me, two of my grad students, although one of my, 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. We have this, so I've not been working with them for several years, and it took a while for us to get used to each other. Their strength is this online social media, large language model, topic network stuff, with an eye towards threats and conspiracy theories and hate. And my strength is conventional social science surveys.

That's a nice overlap. It is. Yeah, that's a nice overlap. It is. Yeah, it's a nice overlap, definitely. It is, we needed to figure out the best synergies. Yeah, yeah, no doubt. It took a while, but we have this rhythm. Why that approach with regards to the dissemination of this information, this particular experimental

information, rather than the more standard journal approach? Yeah, so one of the things, first let me give context, a little more context. So our rhythm is first we post stuff as essentially as a white paper, as a report on the NCRI site. 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. It's different, it is like, I have taken to calling it a homespun pre-print, and here is why I call it a homespun pre-print. It's like a pre-print in that it's a report

of empirical studies that is posted online that haven't been peer reviewed. It is unlike a conventional pre-print in that it is perp, and this is the answer to your question, why did we do it this way rather than make it from peer review? It's part of the answer. It is, even though some of it is highly technical, a lot of the worst of the technical stuff is stripped down

so that it is comprehensible to the lay intelligent audience. And 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, but one of them is that it could take a year,

two years, right? Right, it's horrible. It's horrible. Right. It's unforgivable. Yeah, that's right. It needs to be, that whole system I've been thinking about. It needs to be upended. Completely.

It's like, in this day and age, a two year lag to publication is completely insane. It's crazy, that's right. 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, that's right. How the hell have you not been canceled?

Why is that, because it's weird. 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 canceling? That's the first issue. 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.

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. 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. Sure. There are probably too many of these attempts for me to go through, so I'm gonna pick one. Yeah, pick the cream of the crop. Yeah, this is probably the cream of the crop. Okay.

It is, I refer to it, so I have a very active sub-sac-sci-f, 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? Pops is perspectives on psych science, Mule trope. There's a whole series on this. Okay, so what is POPs? 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. The short version is that I was invited by the editor to do a commentary on a main paper that was critical. The main paper by a psychologist named Hummel, Bernard Hummel, was critical of prior work in psychology advocating for diversity in a variety of ways. 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. And that from a scientific-

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. Hummel's critique was that, was really multiple, but two of his key points were that,

well, there's some types of things, it's irrelevant. Diversity is irrelevant for certain kind of theoretical scientific tests. 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. 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. 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. And there's, okay, there's a distinction there too that we should draw.

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 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. Completely different. Yes, completely different, completely different. That was sort of part of Hummel's critique. Yeah, yeah. But I guess so again, the editor invited me to publish a commentary on this exchange, and the title of my commentary was, is, it eventually got published, is, Diversity is Diverse.

There's lots of different kinds of diversity. 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 oppression. 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 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. So in Fiddler on the Roof, which is what early 20th century Jewish life in the Soviet. One of the great movies of all time. 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. So there's an interlude in the song tradition where the, whatever, the villagers get into an argument because one chimes in, there was the time he sold him a horse, but delivered a mule. And I use that to frame my discussion of progressive disingenuousness. They all disintegrate into fractious argument

in the middle of this song about unity to know when that comes up. When that comes up, that's right. That's right. And I argued in this paper that the way, the reason that's a good metaphor for progressive rhetoric around diversity is that diversity sound, you know,

superficially it sounds good to a lot of people, right? Because who doesn't want to be included? No matter what group you're a member of, the idea that someone is advocating for diversity, it's kind of appealing. And so for example- Yes, with two seconds of thought, it's a positive thing. Yes, with two seconds of thought, it's a positive thing.

Or that people should be free of arbitrary exclusion. Yeah, of arbitrary exclusion, that's right. That's right, and for example, one thing you might think, 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. I mean, the range goes from sort of center left to the far far left.

I have a former- Yes, and that's very well documented. It's very well- No one disagrees with that claim. 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. He surveyed almost 2,000 faculty nationwide at the top colleges and universities and found that 40% self-identified, not just as on the left, not on the left was about 90, 95%, but 40% self-identified as radicals,

activists, Marxists, or socialists. This is the extreme left. This is no longer just like Democrats or liberals. This is nearly half on the far left. And that was a sample of how many people? It was almost 2,000. Now how many faculty members at colleges and universities do you suppose there are in the United States approximately?

Do you have any idea? I have looked into this. It's hundreds of thousands. I don't know the number. Okay, so let's say. I don't remember. I have looked into it. It's very large.

Let's assume 200,000. So that means there's 80,000 academic activists who are being employed full-time in the United States. 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.

Do you think they'd be less? I don't know. Bias? Okay, we don't know. I don't know. Bias? Okay, we don't know. I don't know. Okay, so it's not 80,000, but it could easily be 50,000. Yes, yes. Okay, so that's a number I wanna return to.

Okay, okay. Because there's implications. 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

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 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-centered libertarians from its ranks. So 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? Because once you start combining the categories of oppression, you don't have to make, you don't have, 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? But there's also an infinite, there's literally an indefinite, this is your point, an indefinite number of potentially relevant group categories. 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. 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? And you might think, well, those are the most obvious differences between people,

and maybe you can make that case. But then it's also gender, which is a very weird insistence because whether the idea of gender is a valid, I don't think the idea of gender is a valid idea at all. I think it's super, it's what would you say, it's a warped misconception of everything that's captured by temperament much more accurately and precisely.

We can talk about that. But also sexual orientation. 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. Okay, so you're pointing some of, and then you said, well, there's important elements

of diversity, especially intellectually, like adequate distribution of political or ethical views across the spectrum that's completely off the table. Yeah, it's completely off the table. It's like rejected, it's worse than off the table. So, that was my paper. And 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. All of the commentaries were critical of this oppression framing of diversity. All of them. All of them were. Okay, and this was in P.O.P.S.?

It was in, yeah, Prospective on Psychoscience, yes. Okay, so I just want to provide people some background on this and correct me if I get any of this wrong. So scientists publish in research journals and they generally publish articles of two types. 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. And so, 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. And then there are specialized journals that cover fields like psychology and then there are subspecialized journals and the less specialized the journal, all things considered, the more prestigious it is. Anyways, that's where scientists publish.

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. 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 organizations for psychologists in, especially research-oriented psychologists

in North America. 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. And the American Psychological Society was actually set up, at least in part, because the American Psychological Association 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. That was set up 25- Okay, so that's a little off-kilter. Okay, okay. Yes, I do know this history.

Okay, okay. So, in 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. And what triggered the breakaway of APS from APA in the 90s maybe, wasn't political. It was the scientists who formed APS believed that APA was too focused on clinical practice and practitioner issues. And it was becoming unscientific,

not because of the politics. Well, okay, so yeah, yeah, yeah, fair enough. But see, I was watching that happen because I knew some of the people who were setting up the APS at the time. 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 information. Is that fair? I think that's fair, yes. So the proximal cause was the over emphasis on the clinical. But you know, it's also the case that as you've seen is that certainly the clinical psychology

and the whole therapeutic enterprise has taken a cataclysmic turn towards the woke direction in the last, especially in the last 10 years. 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 get into that. Well, it's probably worse politically, but it's probably not worse practically because social psychologists aren't responsible for helping anybody get on with their lives. I mean, they're responsible for teaching and students and things. They're not, typically, they're not.

You are responsible for implicit bias. That's all we can, you're gonna get me, you are gonna get me distracted. You started by asking me to tell the story of my kids. Yeah, yeah, let's continue with that. Yes, that's it. Okay, so now you're, there's 1,400 people You are gonna get me distracted. You started by asking me how the story of my kids and my friends had. Let's continue with that. Yes, that's that. 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. They should be published. Right, so I presume that these 1,400 are a subset of the 50,000 activists that now. Yes, right.

Right now. I'm curious about the 1,400 too, because you often see legacy media headline news that 1,400 scientists have signed some petition. Yes. But then when you look into it, 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? And out from under which rocks did they climb? And so who were the 1,400? Like, roughly speaking, who were these people that signed? 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. Yes. 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 line from Fiddler on the Roof, there was the 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. Oh yeah, oh yeah, I see, I see. And so that drove. That was your subject, was it? and the Oh yeah, okay, so this is very new. Actually, part of this backstory is very interesting. The editor of the journal at the time is a European psychologist named Klaus Fiedler. Klaus Fiedler is very accomplished. He's an unbelievable, I don't know, hundreds of journal articles, multiple editorships and awards. He was the editor overseeing all this. And my and the other commentaries that he eventually accepted started out as simple reviews.

So when Hamel submitted his paper, it was subjected to peer review. I was one of the peer reviewers. So was one of the other. And Fiedler so liked the reviews that he asked all of us to scale them up to full-length articles. 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, 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. Then they're sent out to experts in that area, multiple experts 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 what happened in this case was the reviews of this, the peer reviews of this particular article were of sufficient quality so that the editor decided that they might... In fact, them is commentary. Right. They might turn into standalone pieces with some development.

But I warned Fiedler, the editor, in my review before anyone had the idea that a version of my review would get published, that if he accepted Hamel'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.

This is in my review. And Jordan, that is exactly. Was that included when it was published or was that? I don't remember, I'd have to go by, 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. It wasn't a message to the editor. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We don't find, I mean, it's not necessarily the case that it didn't stick. Yeah, so Firestorm, APS, like executive director committee of APS, whatever that group is of committee, put an immediate kibosh on this. It was gonna be all published as a discussion forum. That's how Fiedler framed it, as a discussion forum

about diversity issues. They put an immediate halt. Okay, who's they? It's the officers of the Association for Psychological Science. Okay, so now they're broadly overseeing the group of journals that publish under their ages. That's right. Okay, but they generally don't have an editorial say.

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. But it's still the case that generally they don't do such things. Yeah, they don't do this, right.

Right. Partly because often, 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.

Right. Yes. Okay, but they decided that they're not gonna proceed with the publication. 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. Okay.

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. Which is a serious accusation. Yes. 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, that doesn't detract from the seriousness of the obligation. The fact that he was able to successfully 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. They had been accepted but not published. I see, okay, okay. They had been accepted but not published. So how the hell did the complainants get access to the papers?

Like how did they know what the papers were if they hadn't been published? Someone must have, you know, maybe through the, that 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. Had they asked us for the papers, I would have.

Well, they weren't secret. They weren't secret. Yeah, they weren't secret. I mean, people looked. They were publishing their papers so that people could read them. I was just curious, because it's strange that a brouhaha of that sort would emerge prior to publication.

But there was quasi-publications. Yeah, well, it was 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. And who were these special editors

and what made them special? Well, there was us, Samin Vazir and E.J. Wagenmacher. And both of them, I think Samin is now the head editor at Psychological Science. 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. They had a certain cache as able to figure out what to do. I think that's what the APS directory believed. On what grounds do you think this investigation was, how was the progression of this investigation justified? I mean, there's no established precedent in the scientific community for reevaluating an editorial decision based on political objection, right?

Like there's no, we'll re-evaluate if 500 people sign a petition, like this isn't the domain of rule or principle or tradition, right? So, what's the fear here, do you think? These 1400 people signed this petition, which is something that takes like two seconds and costs you nothing and has no risk to you whatsoever. 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. Like from their perspective. Are you willing to speculate? Well, so sure. 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. Publicly. Okay, okay.

Publicly. And I do think that... On what grounds? The mere fact of questioning the diversity agenda constitutes racism. He probably had three main grounds. That was one of them, absolutely. You criticize this, this shows the racism

and it's like that is pervasive throughout psychology. That would be one grounds. Second ground was my use of this, me comparing blacks to mules, with, you know, there was the time he sold a horse and delivered a mule. And then the third was, there was a considerable, so, Fiedler offered-

Kind of missing the point of that. I know, yeah, right. Fiedler offered Roberts the opportunity to respond to the full set of papers, which were generally supporting Hamel's critique, which was really about diversity in general, but its jumping off point was a prior paper by Roberts. Okay, got it.

But he 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. That, Fiedler 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 editor's comments as pains in the ass. But. One, at least once per paper submitted. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right, but whatever. So, but those were his grounds for denouncing all of us as racist. Fiedler made his life difficult. This whole critique of diversity is a testament to white supremacy pervasive in psychology

and me comparing black people to mules. Yeah, okay, go on. Right, that was the grounds. And you asked me to speculate. I have no, I don't have, I have at best very circumstantial evidence. I may not even have circumstantial evidence. I may not even have circumstantial evidence. I strongly suspect, I would really like to test this in the lab run surveys, that liberals, especially white liberals, 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, right? I'm so racked with guilt that there is a vulnerability to just believing anything a person from one of these oppressed, stigmatized groups says, denouncing others. I thought this.

Yeah, well, it's a very quick and easy way to signify the fact that you're not part of the compressor camp. That's right, that's right. Yes, well well has that not been formally tested as a hypothesis? If it has, I don't know. I don't know. Well it needs to be. Yes, I agree.

It totally needs to be. It's something like, from more broadly speaking, is that are there, it's a mechanism of gaming the reputation domain, right? Because obviously our reputations are probably arguably the most valuable commodity, so to speak, that we possess. And every system of value is susceptible to gaming in a variety of ways.

And one way of gaming the reputational game is to make claims of reputational virtue that are risk-free, broad, immediate, and cost-free. Right, and for me, if you're accused of something and I can say, and accused of transgressing against 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, right? Which is a big problem, right? It's like, maybe it's the problem of our time. It's a very big problem. It's a huge problem. Well, especially now, because there's something else that's happened, right? Is that groups of denunciators can get together with much

greater ease than they ever could. Yes, because of social media. Yeah. And the effort necessary to make a denunciation has plummeted to zero. Right. And the consequences of making a false denunciation are also zero. Yes, they're zero. This is not good.

Yes. It's like denunciation firestorm time. And that's certainly happened. Well, so, you know you 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 so The consequences are not non-existent. So the credibility and trust and faith in academia has been in decline for a very long time.

People hate this kind of stuff. So there was- 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. Right. That's for sure.

Yes, that's right. That's exactly right. 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. Yes.

Right, and that's what impulsive people do all the time. So, right, right. That's even the definition of what constitutes a temptation. I was recently listening to your interview for this podcast with Keith Campbell on narcissism. Yes. 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.

And it was- Reputation's a long-term game. It's a long-term game. 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 a whole backstory. That's for sure. So, but it's correlated with narcissism. And that this pleasure that people, 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. Any place infiltrated by narcissists is going to be susceptible to exactly, and the narcissist will use whatever political stance gains them the most immediate credibility, completely independent of the validity of the ideological stance. See, one of the things,

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, I've talked to a lot of moderate progressives, let's say, or moderate, or actually even genuine liberals within the Democrat. Yeah, yeah. Congressman and senators, many of them.

And I've been struck by one thing, and I'm curious about what you think about this. 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.

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. Or, yeah, yeah, 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.

I would make the case that most criminals, 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, anti-social families, et cetera. But there's a subset of criminals. It's 1% of the criminals, 65% of the crimes.

There's a subset of criminals who are not victims. They are really monstrous. And I don't think there's any imagination for the monstrous among the compassionate left. It's all victims. It doesn't matter how egregious the crime. Now, that's something I would have tested as a social psychologist if I still had

an active research lab, which I don't. But the problem with what we know, 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, 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. 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. 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. Yes, absolutely, we're all racists, and the whole thing was racist,

and an abuse of editorial power, and all these accusations. Right, and the editor loses his position. They lose his position, and these two special editors are brought in. Negotiations go on for almost two years. Like, what are they negotiating about? Who's gonna?

Like, what are they negotiating about? Who's gonna, so part of Robert's denunciation, 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. And 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 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. They wanted Fiedler's permission to publish the correspondence, he wouldn't grant it.

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 blew up the journal by firing Fiedler. Right, right, which is like an admission of fault. APS blew up the journal by firing Fiedler. So there was no. Right, right, which is like an admission of fault. So, and about two thirds of the editorial board resigned when he was ousted. So, Hux was without.

That was protest resignation. Yeah, I don't know whether it was protest, we know they resigned, whether it was protest or not. So, they were. Maybe they also thought it was protest or not. So they were. Maybe they also thought it was trouble they didn't need. Right, yes. I mean these are generally, 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? 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. 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, 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. So you can see why people might bail out if it was gonna just be nothing but reputation catastrophe. Exactly right. They'd be thinking, why the hell am I gonna expose myself to this dismal risk when it's already hard and there's very little upside. 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 about whether and when to publish it. And again, this went on for almost two years. So there was like, 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? And it just went on for almost two years. Eventually that was resolved and it was all published. It's all published. And, 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, you're then asked, well how did you survive it?

So let me add this little punch line. At the time that all this was happening, my immediate associate dean, so I was chair of the psychology department at Rutgers, and 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. But the department chairs have a lot of contact with an associate chair. So there might be an associate chair for the sciences. Associate dean? Associate dean, yeah, sorry. Associate dean, yeah, sorry. Associate dean.

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. Okay, so I'm, 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. Remember that this event occurred, the POPs event occurred in 2022.

It's not until almost two years later that stuff was published. So I complete my term as department chair in 2022, 2022-23 I go on sabbatical, still not published. 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.

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, they need the department needed a chair. The dean's office had a lot of faith and confidence in my ability. Because. Despite this, despite the. Because of it. One of the things they said to me was,

you know, this is gonna be a difficult situation because the department is not gonna be happy about having an outside chair imposed on them, but we know you have a thick skin. Hmm, wow. And I, I was like, It's a difficult situation because the department is not gonna be happy about having an outside chair imposed on them, but we know you have a thick skin. 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 it. This is a good thing for people to know too. 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.

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. 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. 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 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. Yeah, that's right. 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 would not, I wouldn't undo it now if I could.

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, absolutely. So the if is that the dragon is real. It's not a game. Yeah, well, no, fire, the same outfit,

Foundation for Interpreted Rights and Expression, keeps a faculty under fire database of faculty who have been subject usually to mob, sometimes administrative investigations, seeking to punish them for what should have been legitimate academic speech protected by academic freedom or even free speech. US state colleges, they're subject to the First Amendment,

which means they shouldn't be in the business. However, hypothetically. 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 track. Get rid of the remaining conservatives.

Well, I will. Or liberals for that matter. 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 that way. Yeah, well another thing, 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, I learned from dealing with like 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. Like it's a seriously bad idea.

And so if the mob or the monster comes for you, your best defense is extremely cautious playing truth. Now that's very different than trying to, what would you say, strategize and manipulate your way out of a difficult situation. 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. 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, 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. 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. We still haven't exactly described why the cancellation attempts weren't successful for you. 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.

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 damaged that was certainly directly implied by the accusation take you out. Like, do you have, was it good fortune? Were there things you did right? Like, how do you assess that?

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. The 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, again, I posted an essay on my sub stack. What's the name of your sub stack? Unsafe Science. Unsafe Science. It's called my Vita of Denunciation.

Okay. And it's called my Vita of Denunciation because it goes through several of these sorts of attacks that I have been through. 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. So the very first piece is that if you're, if you find yourself in the midst of such an attack, go silent. Go silent. Do not engage. Do not engage with your attacker-ous because nearly all of these cancellation type attacks

are massive, brutal, and short. Right, right, right. Two weeks. Yeah, and most. That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And most. And people forget, that's the weird thing

because the present is so large. Yes. You're gonna panic. Yes. Yeah, yeah. Don't panic. Don't panic. That's right. Don't panic.

Don't assume that it's gonna be successful. That's right. Yeah, because people, they might be interested in you today, but they weren't interested in you yesterday. They probably won't be interested in you tomorrow. And it's just like a giant, as a kid we used to go to the beach and body surf and occasionally like a wave that was way bigger

than you could handle would. 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. Yeah, as long as you don't do anything to make it worse. Yeah, yeah. Like apologize, for example.

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. Yeah, yeah, but you should not apologize. 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, 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. 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, because. Yeah, yeah, you need that. You need that. Yeah. I'm completely on board with that. So don't assume that you're morally bad guy. Right? Because, yeah, yeah. You need that, you need that. Yes, that's good. I'm completely on board with that. 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, and may distort how you think about your culpability. Yes, yes, definitely. Yeah, no, that's a very good point. 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. So that could be weaponized. Okay, so go silent. Yeah, go silent. Including, you can always apologize in a month after you've thought it through. Absolutely. If anyone still cares. That's right. Okay, go silent. Including, you can always apologize in a month. You can. After you've thought it through.

Absolutely. If anyone still cares. That's right. Yeah. Okay, go silent. Go silent. Yeah. Record everything.

Yeah, that's for sure. Right? And you're- Everything. Everything. You don't know how you're gonna use it. You may use it to defend yourself going forward, depending on how things unfold. how you're gonna use it. You may use it 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. You want some level. Carefully and strategically. Carefully and strategically. And by recording everything,

you have the raw material to damn your attackers. So that's it, right? Go silent. Yeah, that's especially true if someone's interviewing you. Yeah, it's like record all of it. Record all of it, yeah, record all of it. Seek allies. Yeah.

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. If you don't have them, and 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. Most, my experience has been, at least the kind of networks that I have, they will, people will stand up for you. I mean, I had numbers of people writing essays that got posted in some pretty good places, and real clear politics, I think, was one, right? 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 and the. That's also why you need that time of silence is to muster your resources. Yes. 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 temperature drops. Yes, that's right. That's absolutely right. And then, right, so go silent, record everything, activate your support networks. And then, again, it depends on the situation, 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. 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. 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. 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. And 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. 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. And even though that they never delivered on was 40 acres and a mule. And even though that was never delivered on

for a very long time until you had the mass migration into the North, the black people living in the American South aspire to be successful farmers, and getting a mule was one way to have a successful farm. And so you would see images, paintings, even if you go to southern museums, there's some very famous paintings of black people in fields with a mule pulling a wagon or a,

I don't know, a plow? Yeah, like a plow, yes, right. 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 really became a symbol of people who were oppressed and part of the liberation of people who were oppressed and part of the liberation of people who were oppressed

so that when, after Martin Luther King's assassination, his casket was pulled in a wagon pulled by mules. Okay, so there is, it's not a myth, right? Okay, so given all that, it's less surprising that that speculation might have arisen in relationship to your analogy. Right, right. Right, right.

Things you find out too late. Yes, right, right. So, but it is ironic because the mule is the symbol of the liberation from the oppression rather than the oppression. Right, right. So, you know, right, so. So let me ask you a question about strategy there too.

You know, like 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? 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. And I would say, if you're turning the tables because you're angry, that's not a good idea because you're gonna make mistakes and you're strategizing, right? I think you can distinguish 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. 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, and the problem with a defense

is there's something, well, something defensive. That's not a defensive, is that it? Absolutely, yes, absolutely. Well, I might have made a mistake, but you're right, absolutely. 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. Yeah, well, so that and some of the prior experiences fueled 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. 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. You guys listening on YouTube know about this, that we do another half an hour there. I think I'm gonna talk about 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, I want to delve into that, because it's definitely been social psychologists who've been 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 1920 of complex and implicit association back in the 1920s.

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. 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.

It's like that's insane. That's insane. Even though the postmodernists really do make that claim. 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? That is a hard question. You could spend a thousand years trying to figure that out. 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 offering what you know and also your story to the more general public and join us on the Daily World side if you wanna continue with the discussion. ["The Star-Spangled Banner"]