themselves as “one liberal, one centrist, two libertarians, two who reject characterization,” and no conservatives). “And there are hardly any conservative students in the pipeline.” Most serious social scientists will acknowledge that the field leans left. They’ll also insist that politics doesn’t contaminate their science. This ignores “confirmation bias,” one of the few well-established findings in social psychology. In plain English, the phrase means we tend to believe what we want to believe. Bias is hard to see when everyone you work with is biased in the same direction. Recall the fish who was asked how the water felt... “What the hell’s water?” he replied. Consider again that “extensive academic critique of the right.” One hugely influential paper summarizes its findings like so: A meta-analysis confirms that several psychological variables predict political conservatism: death anxiety; system instability; dogmatism... fear of threat and loss; and self-esteem. The core ideology of conservatism stresses resistance to change and justification of inequality and is motivated by needs that vary situationally and dispositionally to manage uncertainty and threat. This is almost self-parody. Most American conservatives I know favor economic deregulation, want to abolish multiple federal agencies, and welcome the creative destruction of the free market, which is a dumb way to resist change. Notwithstanding its wild inaccuracy, this paper has been cited as sober science in more than 2000 other academic papers since its publication.
MICRO-HOOEY The leftward tilt of social science ensures that it has become a handmaid for the most fashionable ideological fads. The current rage for “microaggressions” is rooted in social science performed more than a decade ago. The existence, power, frequency, and stubbornness of microaggressions are now taken as settled facts. Multiple areas of American life – from policing to education – have been reshaped accordingly. It is the basis of countless “diversity” seminars and training programs in fire departments, corporate workplaces, government agencies, and universities (of course). At the University of Wisconsin, use of the phrase “politically correct” is now officially considered a microaggression. If you describe America as the “land of opportunity” anywhere in the University of California system, you’re judged to be microaggressing and told to knock it off. Or else. The existence, power, frequency, and stubbornness of microaggressions are now taken as settled facts. The microaggression panic happened without anyone stopping to double check the science behind the concept. You won’t be surprised to learn it’s not very good – the rotten fruit of ideological wishful thinking. The phrase was first popularized a dozen years ago in a paper by a professor at Columbia University’s education school. He and his team discovered
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