Empathizing vs. Systemizing – A Book Review of Tattoos On The Heart
I recently read this article from Fast Company about Father Greg Boyle's work at Homeboy Industries, and just like every other time I've encountered stories of this work, it ended with me in tears. It reminded me that I've been meaning to write about Tattoos On The Heart, which just might be my favorite book ever. It certainly is the most moving book I've ever read.
Since this is a blog that is largely about psychology, I'd like to frame my discussion of the book in terms of one of my favorite psychological theories of personality, Simon Baron-Cohen's Empathizing-Systemizing distinction. Father Boyle is a great empathizer, who seems to "enjoy caring for other people", is able to "predict how someone will feel", and knows "what to do in a social situation" (quotes are from Baron-Cohen's scale). In contrast, he is a fairly mediocre systemizer (e.g. reading "legal documents very carefully"), if we are to infer that trait from the finance side of Homeboy Industries depicted in Fast Company. Luckily, he now has help. This empathizing dimension relates to the two things that I feel are most powerful about Father Boyle. His ability to forgive and his ability to tell stories. From the book:
We had lots of enemies in those early days, folks who felt that assisting gang members somehow cosigned on their bad behavior. Hate mail, death threats, and bomb threats were common...From my office once, I heard a homegirl answer the phone, and say to the caller, "Go ahead and bring that bomb, mutha fucka. We're ready for your ass."..."Uh, Kiddo, um," I tell her, "Maybe we should just say 'Have a nice day and God bless you.'"
Some of the gang members have done terrible things, but one of his favorite things to say to those whom most of society would rather ignore is that "you are so much more than the worst thing that you have done." In the Fast Company article, they give money to a woman who punched their receptionist in the face. Sometimes the generosity seems so without limits as to be insane, yet for these youth who have no fear of prison or death, it seems hard to imagine anything but unconditional love being their salvation. In some ways, Father Greg is giving these youth the unconditional love that many of us take for granted from our parents.
Our YourMorals.org data tells a similar story about the characteristics of empathizers. Empathizers (the blue line) in our dataset, tend to forgive others (as measured by questions like being "understanding of others for the mistakes they've made").
As well, empathizers, in our dataset, also tend to enjoy stories (r=.17, p<.001, N=495), and the second trait that makes Father Boyle unique is his ability to tell stories. Stories are a way for human beings to communicate not just information, but the feelings that go along with that information. Indeed, the most common measure of empathy used in psychology, the Interpersonal Reactivity Index, uses items like "I really get involved with the feelings of the characters in a novel" and "Becoming extremely involved in a good book or movie is somewhat rare for me" (reverse scored) to measure empathy. Stories are powerful things. From the introduction of the book:
I have all these stories and parables locked away in the "Public Storage" of my brain, and I have long wanted to find a permanent home for them. The usual "containers" for these stories are my homilies at Mass in the twenty-five detention centers where I celebrate the Eucharist...After Mass once, at one of these probation camps, a homie grabbed both my hands and looked me in the eye. "This is my last Mass at camp. I go home on Monday. I'm gonna miss your stories. You tell good stories. And I hope....I never have to hear your stories again."
Father Boyle's stories really are good and show the polish of years of curation. They transform me every time I read them, reminding me that while justice may feel good, kindness is far more powerful.
If there is a fundamental challenge within these stories, it is simply to change our lurking suspicion that some lives matter less than other lives.
Food for thought. Please do read the book and I'll be quite shocked if you can read the stories in the book without being similarly moved. I can't recommend it enough.
- Ravi Iyer
Big Data Should Measure Value Fit
I gave a presentation at South by Southwest earlier this month. I appreciate the many people who voted for my idea, who attended my talk, and who gave me feedback via twitter or face to face afterwards. It was a great experience.
It was a great experience, not for the people I met or for the thrill of speaking , both of which were nice, but more so because it forced me to think deeply about what I wanted to say. A famous writer once said that “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?”. My thoughts are still evolving (one person, who was positive about the talk, commented to me after that she could see my thoughts evolve on stage), and if I did the presentation over, I would frame it differently, but what I believe I arrived at, is this: Big data should measure value fit. Or perhaps more generally, the proliferation of data should be used to measure the intangible things that we say are important to us.
Here is more or less what I ended up saying in narrated powerpoint:
I was happy with my talk, but I will try to simplify things a bit the next time I do it. Rather than present more cool findings from psychology, which are endless but ultimately forgotten, I would have focused more clearly on the point I started with: that we need to bridge the gap between the things we say we care about and the things that we measure.
Just as countries are starting to question whether measuring gross domestic product is a good measurement of that which is worthwhile, companies should start to question whether measuring profits/monthly unique visitors/return on investment/facebook likes/valuation, is measuring that which is worthwhile. A recurring theme at South by Southwest was a focus on the importance of values and happiness as evidenced by talks with names like "Go Forth and make Awesomeness: Core Values & Action" or "Why Happiness is the new Currency?". But while companies talk about values and happiness as outcomes, they don’t measure them, perhaps because they feel like they can’t measure the intangible. Moral psychology and positive psychology, which deal with the quantification of values and happiness related constructs, can provide this methodology so that big data can eventually be used to measure the right things.
Once you start to think in this way, you can see this need everywhere. On cue, a friend recently sent me this article from the New York Times, that illustrates the points I make. It’s by a courageous Goldman Sachs employee who quit because of he felt, in the terms of this post, that Goldman was measuring success the wrong way.
How did we get here? The firm changed the way it thought about leadership. Leadership used to be about ideas, setting an example and doing the right thing. Today, if you make enough money for the firm (and are not currently an ax murderer) you will be promoted into a position of influence.
What are three quick ways to become a leader? a) Execute on the firm’s “axes,” which is Goldman-speak for persuading your clients to invest in the stocks or other products that we are trying to get rid of because they are not seen as having a lot of potential profit. b) “Hunt Elephants.” In English: get your clients — some of whom are sophisticated, and some of whom aren’t — to trade whatever will bring the biggest profit to Goldman. Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t like selling my clients a product that is wrong for them. c) Find yourself sitting in a seat where your job is to trade any illiquid, opaque product with a three-letter acronym.
Today, many of these leaders display a Goldman Sachs culture quotient of exactly zero percent. I attend derivatives sales meetings where not one single minute is spent asking questions about how we can help clients. It’s purely about how we can make the most possible money off of them. If you were an alien from Mars and sat in on one of these meetings, you would believe that a client’s success or progress was not part of the thought process at all.
I am sure that Goldman Sachs has sophisticated algorithms to use their giant data sets to predict financial markets and make as much money as possible. I doubt they’ve ever considered measuring the values of their employees. Sometimes what you measure is a reflection of your values.
- Ravi Iyer
ps. I am not short on projects, but if you would like help taking the data you have and using it to measure intangible/psychological things, feel free to email me.
The importance of wisdom in social science research
Almost all social psychologists are smart, but few are wise. I would argue that you can't advance our collective understanding of the human condition by being smart, without also adding some wisdom to give context to what you study.
For example, the most essential paradigm in social psychology is the experiment and the more controlled the experiment is, with fewer extraneous variables, generally the more prestigious the article. However, as these experiments become more and more specific, isolating psychological mechanisms and ruling out alternative hypotheses, they also largely become more divorced from reality. After all, reality is usually uncontrolled and contains more, not fewer variables. Further, most experimenters have an initial hypothesis and will keep working to create the conditions that show their hypothesis to be true. As such, if I show that X causes Y in a lab, it doesn't necessarily follow that X causes Y in society. Often, another researcher will confirm that X does not cause Y using a different paradigm. Since you get to construct the paradigm to show what you want to show in an experiment on humans, what does such a study actually prove? Perhaps a better characterization of the findings of such research is that X can cause Y, rather than the more simplistic X causes Y.
There is something very valuable in showing that X can cause Y. Good social science research performs the same function as a good parable or a good memoir, often illustrating a truth that we know deep down, but often forget. Thinking fast can make you take unwise risks. Being grateful can make you happier. Crying wolf can make people ignore real requests for help. Whether through story or statistics, these examples examples of what can happen are often helpful in considering our daily life.
However, the average person often knows many of these truths already and it takes wisdom to move these examples beyond the realm of the self-evident and into the realm of useful knowledge. This recent New York Times op-ed, by Barry Schwartz, illustrates how one can take parables generated by research (e.g. on how too much of something can be bad) and create something wise. In it he argues that efficiency can make us better off, yet can cause hardship too. I excerpt a bit of it below, but it doesn't do the original article justice, so I hope you read it.
So whereas some efficiency is good, more efficiency may not be better. The psychologist Adam Grant and I published an article last year suggesting that the “too much of a good thing” phenomenon may be more general than commonly thought. Some choice is liberating; too much choice is paralyzing. Some motivation produces excellent performance; too much motivation leads to folding under pressure.
...
Perhaps we can use the criticism of Bain Capital as an opportunity to bring a little friction [the opposite of efficiency] back into our lives. One way to do this is to use regulation to rekindle certain social norms that serve to slow us down. For example, if people thought about their homes less as investments and more as places to live, full of the friction of kids, dogs, friends, neighbors and community organizations attached, there might be less speculation with an eye toward house-flipping. And if companies thought of themselves, at least partly, as caretakers of their communities, they might look differently at streamlining their operations.
We’d all like a car that gets 100 miles to the gallon. The forces of friction that slow us down are an expensive annoyance. But when we’re driving a car, we know where we’re going and we’re in control. Fast is good, though even here, a little bit of friction can forestall disaster when you encounter an icy road.
Some social scientists think studying human behavior and thought is like physics. If intelligent people spend enough time on it and collect enough data, we experts can figure out all the rules. But research on human beings is inherently messy, especially for those of us who believe in free will. Just imagine how much trouble physicists would have if atoms could decide whether or not to split.
Another view of social science is that it is but one form of evidence, in a conversation about the human condition that has gone on for millions of years and a marketplace of ideas that is far broader than our parochial disciplines and methods. Social scientists provide a unique and important way of thinking about the world, and I'm hopeful the gap between data and knowledge will decrease as data on human behavior is increasingly collected and shared by all sorts of organizations and the wisdom of crowds replaces the intelligence of a very smart few.
- Ravi Iyer
ps. This is part of a series of posts I'm writing to help crystallize my thoughts for a presentation I'm doing at South by Southwest on how moral psychology and big data are converging. Comments that help sharpen my thinking are welcome and please attend my presentation if you will be at SXSW. I'll certainly upload slides/video afterwards.
Big 5 Personality Traits of would-be Owners vs. Renters
I feel as if sometime in the early 2000s, society collectively decided that it was better to own a home than rent. Property values went up and it seemed like people were willing to go to great personal difficulty simply for the sake of being an owner. It probably didn't hurt that property values kept going up. Still, I never felt a strong urge to own and the prospect seemed more like a burden (fixing your own things, having trouble being able to move) than a blessing. Of course, that may say more about my personality than about owning or renting.
I thought I'd examine the Big 5 personality traits of people who think owning is "better" (e.g believing that home ownership is important to happiness) vs. those who prefer renting (e.g. believing that renting provides significant advantages compared to owneing a home) using ~800 people who answered these questions at yourmorals.org. I had 7 questions about owning vs. renting (alpha = .87). The Big 5 personality traits are 5 personality dimensions that are deemed most parsimoniously able to characterize people. The dimensions are Agreeableness (e.g. how well do you want to get along with others), Conscientiousness (e.g. how detail oriented and tidy are you), Extraversion (e.g. how outgoing are you), Neuroticism (e.g. how tense are you), and Openness to Experience (e.g. how much do you seek out new experiences).
Predictably, people who prefer owning a home vs. renting are more conscientious (r = .08, p=.016) and less open to new experiences (r = -.08, p=.03), but the differences are quite small.
People who want to be owners also also tend to be more conservative (r=.18, p<.001), older (r=.13, p<.001), and tend to prefer buying material things rather than experiences (r=.13, p<.001). Interestingly, there was no relationship to self described social status or gender. Obviously many of these relationships are small, but they certainly are as I would predict, with perhaps the exception of the lack of relationship with wealth and gender (my guess would have been that women and wealthier people would prefer home ownership).
Got any interesting hypotheses relating to the personalities of those who prefer renting vs. owning? I'd happily try them. I'm eager to examing values with regard to owning/renting next.
- Ravi Iyer
Why doesn’t Ron Paul use the word ‘America’ much?
A colleague of mine forwarded me this article in the New York Times, which compared the presidential candidates' usages of various terms. Some words require more context, but what struck him (and me, after I saw it) in this graph is the fact that Ron Paul doesn't use the words America or American very much, even as he talks a lot about war (usually in negative terms), the constitution, and liberty.
A simple possible convergent explanation comes from this graph of questions concerning how much how much a person identifies (e.g. feel's close to, has things in common with, uses the word "we") with people in their community, in their country, and around the world. Ron Paul and libertarians like him, may think of themselves as individuals, moreseo than the typical liberal or conservative, and less as members of a community, a country, or the world.
From a psychological perspective, this is a further illustration of the idea that moral reasoning is intimately inter-twined with social functioning in that people tend to have a moral profile that correlates well with the types of social functioning they desire.
I would argue that a healthy society needs all types of social concerns. Cohesive working units such as armies, companies, and to a lesser extent countries, are necessary for efficiently performing tasks and competing with/defending against other groups. At the same time, it would seem callous to be an extraordinarily efficient society that doesn't care about the plight of others who are not in our group. Finally, any society needs people who are less constrained by group concerns who can push society forward. We should be thankful for the diverse ideological perspectives in our country and rather than seeing politics as war, we could see it as an exercise in finding balance between worthy concerns.
- Ravi Iyer
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Should Protect Fair Negotiations (not the poor)
Recently, President Obama appointed Richard Cordray to be the head of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, created in the wake of the financial crisis to protect consumers. What exactly does it mean to 'protect consumers'?
To some, the goal of the agency is to protect the poor, by regulating companies that provide "payday loans" to poor consumers, often charging extremely high interest rates. I recently listened to an old episode of This American Life, entitled The Giant Pool of Money, which detailed the struggles of some who were given loans that they couldn't pay and the resulting human cost. As a liberal, I am prone to be sympathetic to whatever we can do to improve the lives of the lease fortunate among us.
However, the thing that angered me most in the episode was the story of a veteran who qualified for a Veteran's Home Administration loan, but was instead given a loan for which the mortgage broker received a higher commission, and now pays a 10% interest rate. This veteran has a job and continues to pay his mortgage, but clearly was taken advantage of by someone who likely presented themselves as working on his behalf, but instead wanted a better commission. According to the episode, the commission for this purchase was $18,000 and mortgage brokers at the time were earning $75-100 thousand dollars per month (for a job with little societal benefit).
There will always be a way for people to take advantage of others, whether due to the desperation/need of others or due to their lack of understanding. However, not all immoral ways of making a living are necessarily illegal. Republicans have been consistent in their criticism of the Dodd-Frank law which created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Mitt Romney has promised to repeal it. There is something to be said for the idea that sometimes protecting the poor can cause inefficiencies in the economy and there is no doubt that the liberal impulse to help the poor, and extend them credit, was one of a number of contributing factors to the financial crisis, in that incentives were created to loan money to those who could not afford it. However, I think both liberals and conservatives would agree that when financial negotiations take place, steps should at least be taken to ensure that everyone understands the process.
Below is some data that is suggestive, though not definitive, that liberals and conservatives (as well as moderates and libertarians) might agree more about ensuring a fair process, as opposed to making sure that the poor are protected from predatory lenders. While liberals might feel that protecting the poor is a more immediate concern, the most consensus exists (higher wrongness scores for conservatives/libertarians) for ensuring that everyone completely understands the process when a negotiation occurs.
In the wake of his controversial nomination, Cordray himself positioned the agency as ensuring a fair process, rather than a fair outcome.
The battle between liberal and conservative ideas can be seen as the battle between the balance between ensuring a prosperous society and ensuring a society that cares for the least fortunate in it. Both goals are served by fair, open negotiations where all parties understand what is agreed to, and where people earn a living through activities that add societal value. Whether it is via Dodd-Frank, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or some other means devised by Republicans, I'm hopeful that a consensus can occur around protecting consumers from those who might take advantage of their relative lack of information.
- Ravi Iyer
The Experiential Economy
I recently wrote/created (though the graphic design is not mine) the below infographic for Good Magazine in an issue dedicated to societal trends. The idea here is that the material economy (which produces physical goods like cars and electronics) is being replaced by the experiential economy (which produces experiences like food and vacations). The psychological data is based on a paper we recently had accepted by the Journal of Positive Psychology (along with Ryan Howell and Paulina Pchelin at San Francisco State University) and my dissertation research, all of which focused on the longer term characteristics of people who tend to buy experiences (e.g. dinner at a restaurant) rather than material goods (e.g. clothing).
The take home message is that, convergent with lab research using experimental manipulations, people who report having a preference for experiential purchasing report being happier relative to people who report having a preference for material goods.
The reasons for this have been detailed by other researchers who report that people adapt to experiences less quickly, meaning that good experiences last longer. As well, people who buy experiences are less apt to compare their purchases to others, with the inevitable disappointment that exists when someone out there gets a better deal. For example, I recently bought a Prius and still find myself visiting priuschat.com to see if I got the best deal, an exercise which has no utility whatsoever. On the other hand, my recent hike to Machu Picchu remains an unequivocally positive memory.
I'd like to thank the editor at Good Magazine for asking me to frame things in terms of the direction of the economy as that led me to this Forbes Magazine article, which has data on how Americans spend their discretionary income. Spending generally has gone down due to the recession, but from the perspective of experiential vs. material purchasing, it's clear that experiential purchases (e.g. dining out) are becoming a greater percentage of discretionary spending compared to material purchases (e.g. jewelry). Anecdotally, I've noticed startups that seem to be trying to capitalize on the preference for experiences and my credit card won't just reward me with stuff, but with experiences.
Perhaps if economists want to consider ways to jump start the American economy, they should consider the trend toward experiences, which are intrinsically difficult to outsource. The world doesn't need increasingly more stuff, but there is an experiential deficit out there. Just think of all the elderly who lack humane care, the homeless for whom personal attention is needed, or the way that Zappos has thrived by making customer service a positive experience. In economic terms, if experiences really do create more value for consumers, then the economy should necessarily shift in that direction and I'm hopeful that thinking of "the experiential economy" explicitly will be generative for business leaders, policy makers, economists, and perhaps most importantly, for consumers.
- Ravi Iyer
The Moral Foundations of ThinkProgress, Alternet, Daily Kos, & the NY Times
Over the past couple years, Jon Haidt has had press articles from various liberal leaning press organizations, including these articles from ThinkProgress, Alternet, Daily Kos, and the New York Times.
One of the great things about doing internet research is that web servers automatically collect information that makes it very easy to do cross-sample validation. This information can also be used to compare the people who visited us from these articles. Which group is the most liberal and how do they compare on their moral foundations scores?
First, I thought do a simple comparison of these groups.
There are fewer people from the Daily Kos to be able to be sure about conclusions (hence the larger error bars), but it looks like (unsurprisingly) all of these groups are liberal, compared to people who find us via search engines, who tend to be only slightly liberal. Their moral foundations scores show a similarly more liberal pattern with higher Harm/Fairness scores and lower Ingroup/Authority/Purity scores. Daily Kos readers are the most liberal followed by ThinkProgress & Alternet and then NY Times readers and finally people who found yourmorals.org via a search engine.
To me, the most interesting results are where groups appear to be equally liberal (ThinkProgress & Alternet), but have differences. ThinkProgress visitors appear esepcially low on Purity scores, while Alternet visitors appear significantly higher on Harm/Fairness scores.
An even stronger test of the kinds people who use these websites is to control for how liberal (slight, moderate, or extreme) individuals at these sites report themselves to be and examine individuals within each group of liberals. Those results are below.
This is the graph for people who said they were "very liberal".
These are the results for people who said they were "liberal".
These are the results for people who said they were "slightly liberal". Interestingly, there weren't enough slight liberals in the Daily Kos sample to include them in this graph.
The pattern seems fairly robust in that ThinkProgress visitors care less about Purity. Perhaps they are less religious? Alternet visitors seem to care more about Harm/Fairness. Perhaps they are more empathically motivated and ThinkProgress visitors are more rationally oriented. I don’t know enough about the liberal blogosphere to theorize well about why these differences exist, but I’m hopeful that by sharing these differences, others will be able to enlighten me. At the very least, I hope readers of these sites will find it interesting.
Would you be interested in seeing how your group compares to others on the moral foundations questionnaire? Or visitors to your website? You may have noticed a small "create a group" link on our explore page of yourmorals.org which lets you create a custom URL, whereby each visitor's graphs will not only let them compare their individual scores to other liberals/conservatives, but also to members of their group, and to compare their group scores to the average liberal/conservative. Once you create those URLs, you can put them into blog posts, articles, or emails targeting your group. We are still beta testing the feature, but would welcome anyone who wants to try it out and who perhaps has feedback on how we can improve it.
- Ravi Iyer
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Last 30 Posts:
- May 17, 2012
When should we believe social science findings? - April 25, 2012
Empathizing vs. Systemizing – A Book Review of Tattoos On The Heart - April 5, 2012
Big Data Should Measure Value Fit - March 6, 2012
Five ways that technology will democratize social science - February 20, 2012
The importance of wisdom in social science research - February 18, 2012
Big 5 Personality Traits of would-be Owners vs. Renters - January 25, 2012
Why doesn’t Ron Paul use the word ‘America’ much? - January 7, 2012
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Should Protect Fair Negotiations (not the poor) - December 11, 2011
The Experiential Economy - November 2, 2011
The Moral Foundations of ThinkProgress, Alternet, Daily Kos, & the NY Times - October 15, 2011
Liberals vs. Conservatives:innocent until proven guilty? - September 11, 2011
Does social psychology try too hard to be perceived as a “science”? - August 31, 2011
Equity trumps Equality in arguments about taxation - July 31, 2011
Hypermoral Debt Ceiling Quotes - July 17, 2011
Libya as a moral war (except for libertarians) - July 10, 2011
Oregon’s Medicaid Experiment vs. Motivated Reasoning - June 18, 2011
Relative vs. Absolute Good Choices for Liberals, Conservatives, and Libertarians - May 23, 2011
Personality profiles of readers vs. non-readers and saving your local bookstore. - May 9, 2011
When Ingroup Love does not equal Outgroup Hate - May 2, 2011
Osama Bin Laden’s Death is a chance to escape Zero-Sum thinking - April 23, 2011
Liberals place more value on being funny than conservatives and libertarians. - April 21, 2011
Jon Kyl’s Moral Confabulation is something we all do. - March 30, 2011
Why should the US lead in Libya? Liberal-Conservative Value Differences. - March 24, 2011
Perceptions of Scarcity & Responsibility inform Budget Negotiations - February 27, 2011
Psychological Correlates of Feelings Toward Labor Unions among Liberals - February 22, 2011
Reagan was a Union Member – Visiting his Library as an exercise in Civil Politics - February 15, 2011
Psychology is generally Continuous, not Categorical - February 11, 2011
Are liberals more neurotic than conservatives? - February 10, 2011
Can liberal academics study conservative ideology? - January 17, 2011
Rush Limbaugh says Civility is the New Censorship
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Civil Politics Posts
- What Does it Mean to be Civil? May 8, 2012 Hal
- WNPR Connecticut Hosts a Discussion of Civil Politics April 27, 2012 Ravi Iyer
- The No Labels 12-Point Plan: CivilPolitics Analysis March 22, 2012 Jonathan Haidt
- My data-driven conversion to (relative) political moderation March 15, 2012 Jarret Crawford
- Today is Town Meeting Day in Vermont (and what that has to do with civil politics) March 6, 2012 Liz Joyner
When should we believe social science findings?
Recently, some colleagues of mine forwarded me this article from the Weekly Standard concerning the use of social science to delegitimize conservatism. There are some valid points in this article that the author uses to question specific studies. However, I think the author fails to understand the breadth of evidence that underlies most social science findings.
Social scientists deal with a far more complex subject than scientists who work with rocks or chemicals. Specifically, human beings have free will. They can decide to do or not do things in response to a stimulus. Further, because we care about human beings in a way that we don't care about rocks, we can't always design studies perfectly, as we have to respect the wishes of others. As such, all social science has problems of sampling and generalizability.
But the fact that all social science research has flaws doesn't mean you should ignore it. For example, presidential polls have flaws, even with the author's preferred sampling method, as question wording, non-response, and weighting to correct for non-response all introduce bias. While each poll is imperfect, each poll still give us some understanding of what is going on in the population. Perhaps more critically, different polls have different flaws, which means that if you aggregate across measures (e.g. see Nate Silver's five thirty eight blog), you can get something close to the truth (the same principle underlies the Wisdom of Crowds). Yes, a survey of yourmorals.org volunteers or undergraduates or mechanical turk participants or randomly selected households who will answer a survey, is imperfect. Yes, artificial experiments, neuroscience correlations, and self-report are all imperfect. But they are all imperfect in somewhat different ways, and if you find the same thing across each of these samples using a variety of different methodologies, then you can be pretty confident of your findings.
Personally, I don't believe any single study or paper, and a I wait to see if there is confirmation across research groups, methodologies, and samples before believing any research. This is true in social science and in other sciences as well. Andrew Ferguson, who wrote the Weekly Standard piece, is capitalizing on an intuition we all likely share, that so many studies out there report so many facts, many of them contradictory (e.g. is alcohol good for your health?), that we can't help but question them. And we should. Individual studies and papers are not proof, and we probably shouldn't report them as such. But much of this research that relates to liberal and conservative differences has many studies using many methodologies and samples behind them, and that is where we can be more confident. It is for this reason that I increasingly find myself drawn to computer scientists and data scientists who work on questions of aggregation, and as technology starts to pervade social science, my guess is that social science will move more towards aggregation and also place less emphasis on individual papers.
I agree with Ferguson that pathologizing the other side isn't helpful, but not because the science is wrong, but because the interpretation often is subject to bias. A lack of empathy can be thought of as an ability to make rational, competent decisions or heartlessness. Loyalty to one's family can be thought of as noble or as nepotism. Reliance on one's intuition can be thought of as indicative of common sense or of ignorance. But the fact that these things differ between liberals and conservatives are indeed facts, with as much evidence behind them as facts like cholesterol causes heart disease. The world's knowledge graph will eventually encompass not just physical facts, but facts like these as well.
- Ravi Iyer