Dad warned me about professors in the social sciences

Instapundit picked up an article from the New York Times about a social scientist who identified a new "outgroup" - conservatives.  About time:

He polled his audience at the San Antonio Convention Center, starting by asking how many considered themselves politically liberal. A sea of hands appeared, and Dr. Haidt estimated that liberals made up 80 percent of the 1,000 psychologists in the ballroom. When he asked for centrists and libertarians, he spotted fewer than three dozen hands. And then, when he asked for conservatives, he counted a grand total of three.

“This is a statistically impossible lack of diversity,” Dr. Haidt concluded . . .

Heh.  This just cracks me up.  Hundreds of highly-educated people who study patterns of discrimination professionally are shocked to discover what most everyone else already knew -- that THEY are currently  discriminating against an "outgroup".  Many of them really do live in a little intellectual bubble.  Makes you wonder where else their limited focus blinds them to understanding what is going on in the world.  Tigerhawk has further observations:

Er, have any of you ever met a social psychologist? They are an intimidating bunch. . .

Reason #42 why the "academic freedom" justification for tenure is a crock, by the way.

Anyway, the relevant professional society debated and but ultimately rejected an affirmative action program for conservatives, for which I suppose we should all be grateful.   The last thing conservatives need is to sully their ranks with social psychologists.

I left a comment. Wonder if I'll get flamed?  Tigerhawk gets some traffic:

My Dad taught at a college with a more conservative faculty and staff than most colleges. He observed during the early 70s that the sociology professors were reliably the rudest people at any faculty function - talking loudly during speeches, leaving en masse during speeches or at other inappropriate times while projecting a sense of boredom and derision, etc.

Maybe social scientists are still stuck in the 60s and 70s with regard to their prejudices against conservatives.   Daniel Henninger recently suggested that the irrational belief among the liberal elite that the Right is inherently violent can be traced back to an essay written in 1964. I think the backlash to the media's delusional focus on the Tea Party after the Arizona shootings was kind of a surprise to some of the people who deeply believe that the Right is dangerous.

Stevie Wonder:

When you believe in things that you don't understand, then you suffer.
Superstition ain't the way.
Hey, hey, hey.

Take a little break to listen to the video linked above. It's from Sesame Street. Two drummers, great bass guitar and brass, kids on percussion.  Everything comes together.  The music was definitely better than men's fashion back then.

UPDATE:  Dad did not warn me about economics professors:  STEPHEN DUBNER ON POLITICAL BIAS IN ACADEMIA:

“It is interesting — and sobering — that two fields, psychology and economics, that we rely upon to describe and amend bias in the world are themselves so susceptible to bias within the ranks of their practitioners.”

It also may lead many people, reasonably, to dismiss much of their work as politically tainted and untrustworthy.