He is quoted by Chris Mooney as saying,
When the facts conflict with…sacred values, almost everyone finds a way to stick with their values and reject the evidence. On the left, including the academic left, the most sacred issues involve race and gender. So that’s where you find the most direct and I’d say flagrant denial of evidence. I think the results of this study do clearly show that political concerns influence the willingness of sociologists to consider a major class of causal factors in human behavior.
Read Mooney’s whole piece. The study he refers to is by sociologist Mark Horowitz and two colleagues.
Plus, there is this article on Haidt on social psychology. Pointer from Jason Collins.
William James explained this phenomenon with greater insight:
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/5116/5116-h/5116-h.htm#link2H_4_0007
Our minds thus grow in spots; and like grease-spots, the spots spread. But we let them spread as little as possible: we keep unaltered as much of our old knowledge, as many of our old prejudices and beliefs, as we can. We patch and tinker more than we renew. The novelty soaks in; it stains the ancient mass; but it is also tinged by what absorbs it. Our past apperceives and co-operates; and in the new equilibrium in which each step forward in the process of learning terminates, it happens relatively seldom that the new fact is added RAW. More usually it is embedded cooked, as one might say, or stewed down in the sauce of the old.
New truths thus are resultants of new experiences and of old truths combined and mutually modifying one another. And since this is the case in the changes of opinion of to-day, there is no reason to assume that it has not been so at all times. It follows that very ancient modes of thought may have survived through all the later changes in men’s opinions. The most primitive ways of thinking may not yet be wholly expunged. Like our five fingers, our ear-bones, our rudimentary caudal appendage, or our other ‘vestigial’ peculiarities, they may remain as indelible tokens of events in our race-history. Our ancestors may at certain moments have struck into ways of thinking which they might conceivably not have found. But once they did so, and after the fact, the inheritance continues. When you begin a piece of music in a certain key, you must keep the key to the end. You may alter your house ad libitum, but the ground-plan of the first architect persists—you can make great changes, but you cannot change a Gothic church into a Doric temple. You may rinse and rinse the bottle, but you can’t get the taste of the medicine or whiskey that first filled it wholly out.
The first paragraph sounds like strong Bayesian priors. The second sounds like Thomas Kuhn.
My knee-jerk reaction is to reject any argument from someone who calls others “deniers”. I will, however, enterain any viewpoint that is expressed respectfully and without calling opponents names. (This disqualifies a certain Nobel prize winning NY Times op-ed writer, even though his insults are too juvenile to be truly hurtful–calling someone a “cockroach” is just rude and immature, but calling someone a “denier” is hateful.)
That said, it’s good to have these facts reported. But nobody should be surprised. We all have our sacred cows, and academics certainly hold onto them with greater passion than do non-academics. My own weakness is considering randomization the elixir of good research and to reject any findings not based on a randomized design (real or quasi-).
I think that a good way to deal with these biases, is not just to recognize that we all have biases, but to act on that recognition by supporting a diversity of self-governing models into and out of which we could all move, and by limiting the extent to which a majority can bind a minority in (at least some) these models. Pretty harmless belief, but a belief that would still place me somewhere along one of Arnold’s axes, which would suggest bias.
“…just under 50 percent thought it plausible that we have an innate fear of snakes and spiders (for very sound, survival-focused reasons).”
Wow. Not even a majority. The other 50+ percent thought what, exactly?
“Wow. Not even a majority. The other 50+ percent thought what, exactly?”
That snakes and spiders are cute and cuddly. Natural selection is getting around to them now that it’s dealt with those that thought sabre-tooth tigers were fun playmates.
In a similar vein to comparing political views to positions on evolution and climate change, I’d like to see a comparison of political leanings to positions on astrology and homeopathy.