The psychology of political correctness

Recently, I've been spending some time learning about the intersection of politics and psychology, and I've tried to gain a better understanding of conservative viewpoints.One paper I read recently is this (it's PLoS ONE, so it should be free for anyone to access). Here's a portion of the Abstract:

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2,212 U.S. participants filled out the Moral Foundations Questionnaire with their own answers, or as a typical liberal or conservative would answer. Across the political spectrum, moral stereotypes about typical liberals and conservatives correctly reflected the direction of actual differences in foundation endorsement but exaggerated the magnitude of these differences. Contrary to common theories of stereotyping, the moral stereotypes were not simple underestimations of the political outgroup's morality. Both liberals and conservatives exaggerated the ideological extremity of moral concerns for the ingroup as well as the outgroup. Liberals were least accurate about both groups.

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emphasis added

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In a nutshell, nobody in the study was particularly good at predicting how someone else would answer the questionnaire; but as it turned out, self-identified liberals were the least accurate in predicting the moral beliefs of other people, including the moral beliefs of hypothetical other liberals!This result makes me hesitate to criticize people like Faith, who constantly yammer about "Marxist PC" and stuff. "PC" of course means "political correctness," which I understand to be the practice of moderating speech and behavior patterns to at least nominally conform to certain prevailing opinions about morality.Could it be that people like Faith are better judges of people's morals than we (liberals) are? How could that be? Isn't she, like... a racist, or something?Or, is she right that political correctness has made liberals completely unable to understand the morality of traditional conservative values?

Hi, Modulous. Go figure you'd have heard of the guy before. I hadn't until just a couple days ago, after following some of Faith's comments on the New Primary thread. I came across this review of Haidt's book, and I tracked the paper down from there. I also read this review, which isn't quite as favorable.It struck me that this work aligns a bit with the common conservative complaints about liberal PC. Faith often complains about PC liberals putting her in a box or categorizing her, which seems to fit pretty squarely with the notion the liberals defining conservatives too coarsely.What surprises me about this is I would have expected the opposite. After all, I always feel like conservatives are mischaracterizing my views. But, this has made me re-evaluate myself: maybe I'm not as much as victim as I think I am? Somewhat irritatingly, that also aligns with something conservatives say about liberals.It certainly opens the mind a little bit, at the very least.

Hi, Hyroglyphx. There definitely is some variance around the mean, so there's no guarantee that Faith, specifically, is a superlatively accurate judge of moral character. I think the only point I would make is that those of us who think she's off her rocker should be willing to entertain the notion that there's likely a kernel of truth in her accusations. And our distaste for some aspects of her character doesn't necessarily invalidate some of the points she's trying to make.{AbE Disclaimer: I think Faith is a decent human being who is not crazy, but is both wrong and misunderstood, depending on circumstance. I did not mean to imply here that I dislike her, that she is crazy, etc.}Edited by Blue Jay, : Disclaimer

Hi, Jon. A tendency toward self-criticism is a trait you and I seem to share. There always seems to be some sub-group within any group that, for whatever reason, is intensely bothered by the failings of the ingroup. I feel like that's the kind of person Jonathan Haidt (the author of the paper I read) is, too; and that's the motivation behind much of his professional work. This is probably true; and it's the core of the whole conservative, anti-PC movement. But, Haidt's paper actually found that both conservatives and liberals exaggerated the extremity of people's views, even within their own ingroup. It's just that liberals were somewhat more extreme about it.So, everybody thinks "lefties" fit way over there, and "righties" fit way over there, but I'm somewhere in between them.The prevailing trend is that people see themselves as more moderate than everyone else.So, you're right about compartmentalizing the world: and you're probably right that the academic left has taken it to the most extreme of anybody. You can see it everywhere. We humans seem to find some comfort in being able to assign names to things. As one example, consider TV commercials that say things like, "You don't have some freak problem, you're like these other people who understand what you're going through; there's a name for it, and now there's a pill for it!"----- Do you feel better now, having gotten that off your chest? That's certainly one thing that's happening. Back when I was a PhD student, I met another entomology grad student at a conference in Poland. I told her that my wife was expecting our second child, and she immediately asked, "are you going to have anymore?" I said that we hadn't decided. She instantly went into a diatribe about overpopulation, and said that if I wanted another child, I should adopt; she expressed her faith in my ability to be a good father to an adoptive child, and made sure it was clear that having 3 kids was too many.Keep in mind that I had just met this girl the day before, and had only held two conversations with her (in a group setting both times). Also, she was about 20 years old (I was 27). I was so blindsided by her speech, and so naturally non-confrontational, that I just kind of sat there dumbfounded for about half an hour (it was during a banquet, and I was kind of stuck sitting there). What was I supposed to do? I still don't know.So, yeah, there's a lot of overzealous behavior among liberals, and a lot of "so, you're one of them"-style tactics being used. And, like you, I really dislike it, even though I share a lot of the same worldview.

Hi, RAZD. I wasn't sure how to respond to this, because I'm not quite clear on what you mean. But, Modulous brought up the relevant part of the paper in Message 13: I think this might comport with your first impression: conservatives evaluate morality using a larger set of criteria, so perhaps the added criteria serve as additional constraints. So, the conservatives' confidence intervals are narrower (that is, they allow less "wiggle-room" around their decision), and consequently they give much more rigid moral answers in specific scenarios?

My thoughts on political correctness are, like everything in my mind, conflicted.As I routinely mention, I was raised Mormon. I grew up in a very conservative home with multiple generations of Mormon tradition, and harbored very conservative views about everything up until my college education and beyond. I married a Mormon with an equally deep Mormon heritage, at a time when my Mormon convictions were still strong, but my philosophy was shifting in response to my new training in science and reason. I am now thoroughly convinced that continuing to pursue religious thinking and a religious lifestyle is not a productive use of my time and resources.That said, transitioning away from it is not very simple. My impression of it is that it's kind of like learning a new language. You learn how to take what you want to express and convert it into the closest approximation in the other language. If you get good at it, you can do it really quickly; you may even start to find that you prefer the second language's ways of expressing certain things, and sometimes you even find these expressions integrating themselves into the way you think.Right now, in some ways I feel like I'm "socially bilingual." I'm mostly developing liberal viewpoints on a lot of social issues, but I still find that I frequently empathize with conservatives rather than liberals during debates or discussions. Conservative talking points still resonate in my mind, even if my liberal-influenced intellect finds them unsatisfying.I don’t think I've reached full "liberal fluency" yet. I don't know if I ever will, or if I really want to. But, in some ways, liberalism feels like an alien invader in my brain. I often find myself thinking in two ways on the same issue, which makes me really indecisive and unwilling to trust my own thinking. So, I'm kind of inclined to substitute someone else's judgment in place of my own.To get to the point, I often get the vague impression that I'm not really becoming more liberal in my reasoning or viewpoints: I'm just learning how to mimic a system of protocols that comes in a book entitled, "How to act like a liberal in twenty-two thousand, four hundred and seventeen easy steps!" Maybe it's some weird from of impostor syndrome: if I behave like a liberal, it's mainly because I'm following a script so the other liberals will think I'm one of them. I mean, I am usually very guarded about how I speak and about how I choose my battles: it's probably affecting me more than I know. But, I still feel like reason leads me to these conclusions, even if they feel a little unnatural to me.I wonder if this is the same sort of sensation that makes conservatives accuse the left of "political correctness." The only way they could reason themselves to a liberal position is by going against their ingrained philosophies, so that must be how other liberals got there too. And, I have to admit, based on my personal experience, the criticism resonates a little bit.

Hi, Genomicus. I don't think it's necessary, per se: I"m just describing what I think is happening. I sometimes find myself thinking in two very different ways. Even though I've rejected Mormonism, I still get angry when other people criticize Mormonism, and I still feel uncomfortable walking down the beer aisle at the grocery store, things like that.In a similar way, I don't agree with conservative views on most things, but I have a hard time arguing against them when I hear them, because in a way, they still "make sense" to me. I'm no psychologist, but I think my specific issue is that rejecting a lifetime of my own reasoning has generated a lot of doubts about my own reasoning, so it's easy to just accept that somebody else is right, and let their reasoning substitute for my own.I guess the main point is that my intellect leads me to agree with liberal viewpoints on most social issues, but my ingrained "comfort zones" haven't extended to cover these viewpoints yet.So, even though I think many of the liberal viewpoints are better, they feel unnatural, like somebody else is telling me what to think. And that sounds a lot like what conservatives say about liberals and PC: "The Left thinks you must agree with them, or you get labeled. So, leftists don't think for themselves: they just think and say what they're told to think and say." Edited by Blue Jay, : No reason given.

Hi, Caffeine. Maybe you're on to something. I have my suspicions that liberalism is generally a less "natural" way of thinking, because it deals with considering and engaging with diversity and different viewpoints, etc. Here's another paper that I found recently, but haven't read yet. Basically, they subjected people to various types of cognitive "stress" and recorded their responses to political questions. As it turns out, the study subjects' responses became more conservative when they were distracted, pressed for time or even drunk (yes, they took their experiment to the bar).A trite and tactless interpretation of the results is that the Dark Side conservatism is easier and lazier, but liberalism takes effort.But the idea that liberalism requires "training" invokes Pavlovian images, doesn't it? I mean, what do the conservatives say about liberals? "Liberals are sheeple"... "liberals all walk in lock-step, or else"... "they reason like robots, with broad categories and labels for everything"... These all sound like criticisms that arise from the idea that liberalism is somehow "unnatural," don't they?

Okay, so I'm not willing to accept the Lind-Faith narrative of political correctness as an insidious extension of Marxism; but I do feel like political correctness does interfere with the priorities of academia in some major ways.And I'm obviously not the only one. Here is a book edited by some rather big names in sociology/psychology who were getting so concerned that political correctness was functioning as an informal type of censorship in their field that they thought it necessary to write a book about it. And there are a lot of psychologists who contributed to it.There's a preview of the book available through Google Books, but it doesn't give much of the meat. But, having just read that, there seems to be plenty of anecdotal evidence of political correctness creating an atmosphere of repression and taboo that these professionals think it is stifling their field of inquiry. Potential contributors declined to participate in the project over fears of career reprisal. Other researchers avoid politically sensitive topics out of fear of being stigmatized or otherwise harmed professionally.I think we should all take this topic as more than just the paranoid delusion of right-wing loonies.