The Second Conference of the Society for Open Inquiry in the Behavioral Sciences
The Society for Open Inquiry in the Behavioral Sciences (SOIBS) was organized to be a refuge from the soft cultural revolution (read: “wokification”) of the academic social sciences (I am one of the founders). I introduced the society here and summarized our first conference here. In this essay, I briefly summarize some of the research that was presented at the conference, which was attended by, I’d estimate, 80-100 people over the course of a full day (people were coming in and out all the time).
Cory Clark and I opened up the conference with a few choice remarks. I closed the opening with, what I hope, will be a tradition: Quoting that great 20th century poet, Harry Nilsson:
You’re breakin’ my heart
You’re tearing it apart
Below, you will find descriptions of some of the research presented at our February 2024 conference.
Ideologies Aren't as Principled as We Think
David Pinsoff, Independent Researcher
Polling data from nationally representative samples (n = 800) indicate that ideological inconsistencies are prevalent across the political spectrum. For example, 40-70% of conservatives believe that people should not be so easily offended (but Black Lives Matter is offensive), that we should have more respect for authority (but businesses should resist government regulations they think are unfair), and that we should be more suspicious of foreigners (but we should trust Vladimir Putin when he said that he did not interfere with the 2016 election). Likewise, 40-70% of liberals believe that it is unfair for corporate CEOs to make millions of dollars a year (but it is fair for Hollywood movie stars to make millions of dollars a year), that Muslims should not be held responsible for terrorist attacks committed in the name of Islam (but Trump voters should be held responsible for the terrorist attack committed at Charlottesville), and that it is wrong to endorse negative stereotypes about a group of people based on their place of birth (but people from the south are racist). Existing theories of ideology struggle to explain these inconsistencies, but Alliance Theory (which posits that ideologies derive from political alliance structures and not moral principles) can explain them.
Who’s Killing Free Speech on Campus?
Kevin Wallsten, California State University, Long Beach
Free speech on college campuses is slowly dying. One part of this slow death is the growing number of “deplatforming” attempts. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these attempts come predominantly from those on the political left and target speakers on the political right.
So who is responsible for killing this part of campus free speech? There are three main suspects: (1) “illiberal liberal” students (i.e. self-identified “liberal” students that endorse all forms of disruptive action and support bans for all controversial conservative speakers); (2) ideologically homogenous faculties; and (3) diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) bureaucracies. It is, of course, possible that each of these groups “acted” alone. It is also possible they each played their own, unique part in the death of free speech at universities.
In order to sort out who did what, I ran an OLS regression model predicting the total number of campus deplatforming attempts based on: (1) the share of its student body that qualifies as an “illiberal liberal”; (2) the share of its faculty that students perceive as liberal; and (3) the size of its DEI bureaucracy. While each is positively correlated with the number of deplatforming incidents in a bivariate analysis, the multivariate analysis suggests that only how many “illiberal liberals” a campus has is related to its overall frequency of deplatforming attempts. More work is needed here (e.g. data on a larger number of universities, a better measure of faculty political preferences, a wider variety of controls, etc.) and this does not get faculty or DEI off the hook (see, for example, the evidence that universities with larger DEI bureaucracies are less tolerant of conservative speakers and more supportive of disruptive actions to prevent campus speech) but it does serve as strong evidence that students have played a significant part in killing free speech on campus.
Indirect Scientific Censorship: The Intellectual War Between Forced Consensus and the Beautiful Mess
Lucian Gideon Conway, III, Grove City College
Some censorship is direct – such as the removal of posters from conferences. Some censorship is less direct, emerging instead as an inevitable consequence of forced consensus. In this paper, I argue that the field of Social Psychology has increasingly adopted a model that promotes indirect censorship through forced consensus. In doing so, I observe that (1) political authoritarianism (e.g., DEI programs) is not the cause of our current scientific malaise, but rather a symptom of a bad scientific model focused on forced consensus. (2) Further, I argue that this bad model of science does not randomly select censored items, but instead selectively removes deep-thinking issues that science needs to progress. (3) Finally, I suggest a change in scientific models. Rather than winning an argument with a few editors and organizational bodies who then force consensus on various issues (a model inevitably leading to indirect censorship), scientists should try to win an argument with the entire field. Although this open-science model is messier and more difficult, it produces better long-term outcomes.
Moralization of Covid-19 Health Response: Asymmetry in Tolerance for
Human Costs
Tania Reynolds, University of New Mexico
moralization may have undermined science surrounding responses to the Covid 19 pandemic. Because Covid posed such a formidable and potentially controllable threat, we hypothesized that efforts to eliminate the virus or reduce its health effects became moralized. When values become moralized to the level of sacred values, merely questioning their authority can provoke moral outrage. We hypothesized that Covid elimination efforts became moralized to this level of sacred values and thus, questioning them would be deemed intolerable.
We recruited a sample of 170 New Zealanders and randomly assigned them to view one of two versions of a research proposal. The first proposal hypothesized that Covid elimination efforts (e.g., lockdowns) were reducing suffering. The second hypothesized that the elimination efforts were actually leading to increased suffering because Covid deaths were uncommon among those younger than 65. In fact, both proposals used the same facts to justify their opposing hypotheses.
Compared to the proposal hypothesizing that elimination efforts were reducing suffering, participants perceived the research proposal questioning the elimination strategy (the one hypothesizing that these efforts might actually be causing more suffering), as containing less accurate information, as less rigorous, and as possessing lower quality writing. Participants also experienced greater moral outrage, they evaluated the researchers as less respectable, and they perceived the research as less valuable to society. We also gave participants $1 to allocate to either the researchers or to two well-known New Zealand charities. Participants donated less money to the research team when they hypothesized that Covid elimination efforts were actually inflicting more suffering.
Our findings suggest Covid elimination efforts were moralized to the point where empirical scrutiny was discouraged. This is consistent with the patterns found when sacred values are questioned. Our results suggest the potential costs from Covid elimination efforts could have been underacknowledged, under-examined, or deprioritized. Likewise, our results suggest conducting much-needed empirical assessments of these tradeoffs might have been discouraged, underfunded, or dismissed as invalid. Broadly, this research reveals moralization can undermine nuanced discussions and empirical assessments, which are critical for advancing the most efficacious policies and interventions
Chronic Cannabis Use in Everyday Life
Michael Inzlicht, University of Toronto
Approximately 200 million people consume cannabis annually, with a significant proportion of them using it chronically. Using experience sampling, we describe the effects of chronically getting high on emotions, motivation, effort, and self-regulation in everyday life. We queried chronic users (N=260) 5 times per day over 7 days (3,701 observations) to assess immediate effects of getting high and longer-term, between-person effects. Getting high was associated with more positive emotions and fewer negative emotions. Contrary to stereotypes, we observed minimal effects on motivation or objective effort willingness. However, getting high was associated with lower scores on facets of conscientiousness. Surprisingly, there was no evidence of a weed hangover. Relative to less frequent users, very frequent users exhibited more negative emotions dispositionally, but they were more motivated. They also reported less self-control and willpower.
Those were all talks, but there were also a few posters. I did not keep them, except for mine. This was my entire poster:
A Proposal for Radical Intersectionality: Judge People as Individuals
Prove me wrong1
I did not list it on my vita.