Social Psychologists

Are they impeded in their work by their refusal to accept evolutionary psychology?

In short, yes. It’s part of the Left’s war on science, and its war on human nature. If people aren’t tabula rasas, how are we to create the New Soviet Man?

[Update a few minutes later]

This is interesting:

On an optimistic note, Buss and von Hippel point out that their survey found that a substantial minority of social psychologists did endorse findings rooted in evolutionary biology. But still there is a long way to go until the schism in psychological and theoretical perspectives is bridged – a situation they believe is likely made worse by the lack of proper training in evolutionary sciences in psychology*. “Not a single degree-granting institution in the United States, to our knowledge, requires even a single course in evolutionary biology as part of a degree in psychology,” they write, adding that this is “an astonishing educational gap that disconnects psychology from the rest of the life sciences.”

I hadn’t been aware of this, but it’s one more reason to not take the field seriously.

5 thoughts on “Social Psychologists”

  1. As a case in point, Buss and von Hippel highlight the recent book Testosterone Rex: Unmaking the Myths of Our Gendered Minds by psychologist Cordelia Fine

    Greg Cochran dismantled that book here. He ran a $500 kickstarter to compensate himself because he really didn’t want to actually read the thing.

  2. Maybe we should be suspicious of a field of study in which people with ideological axes to grind assume that the existence of a phenomenon mean that its magnitude and sign justify the policies they would have backed anyway.

    But enough about global warming …

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