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A Social Psychology Hoax? (Or Is Social Psychology Itself A Hoax?)

Remember the wonderful Alan Sokal hoax on the ponderously pontificating journal, Social Text? As the New York Times reported in May 1996,

A New York University physicist, fed up with what he sees as the excesses of the academic left, hoodwinked a well-known journal into publishing a parody thick with gibberish as though it were serious scholarly work.

The article, ?Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,? appeared this month in Social Text, a journal that helped invent the trendy, sometimes baffling field of cultural studies.

?At first glance,? according to the Sokal Hoax entry in the Museum of Hoaxes,

the article appeared to be an unlikely candidate for controversy. It was written in the typical style of academic articles, slightly overbearing and verbose, and it came armored with a bristling flank of footnotes (more footnotes than actual text). But on the day that the Spring issue of Social Text appeared in print, the author of the article, New York University physics professor Alan Sokal, published a letter in the academic trade publication Lingua Franca revealing his article was intended as a parody, a fact which the editorial board of Social Text had apparently failed to recognize.

?Any competent physicist or mathematician (or undergraduate physics or math major) would realize that it is a spoof,? Sokal asserted. He suggested that his article?s acceptance by the journal pointed to ?an apparent decline in the standards of rigor in certain precincts of the academic humanities.? He also fumed over ?how readily they [Social Text] accepted my implication that the search for truth in science must be subordinated to a political agenda.?

Is Too Much Freedom of Choice a Problem?, a PsychCentral report by ?Rick Nauert PHD News Editor,? of a study about to be published in Psychological Science, is so bizarre that I immediately wondered if we were confronting another Sokal-sized hoax in the making.

The study purports to find that ?a central tenet of American life,? choice ? the availability of choices and the necessity of making them ? is a bad thing. Bad for individuals; bad for the society. Really. Thus: ?Social psychology researchers found that just thinking about choices makes people less sympathetic to others and less likely to support policies that help people.?

You may think I?m joking, but I assure you: if there?s a joke here, it?s not mine. According to the PsychCentral report:

So the researchers conducted a series of experiments to look at how thinking about choice affected people?s feelings on public policies.

For example, in some experiments, participants watched a video of a person doing a set of routine daily activities in an apartment. Some people were told to push the space bar every time he [sic] made a choice; others were told to do so every time he [sic] touched an object for the first time. They were then asked their opinions on social issues.

That was the research design. Here?s what the research is said to have found:

Simply thinking about ?choice? made people less likely to support policies promoting greater equality and benefits for society, such as affirmative action, a tax on fuel-inefficient cars, or banning violent video games.

Another experiment found that when people think about choice, they are more likely to blame others for bringing bad events on themselves, like having a heart attack or losing a job.

By now some of you may still think I?m making this up, but at least anyone who has been reading this blog for a while will know that?s impossible because I?m not that clever. Nor does it seem likely that the main researcher, Krishna Savani, a postdoctoral research scholar at the Columbia Business School, is capable of creating such a mind-boggling parody of social psychology today. Oh, wait. Perhaps I?m being unfair to him. Could Prof. Savani?s description of his teaching and research interests itself be part of the hoax?

[His] research examines how the ideas, practices, and situations pervasive in different societies shape the way people think, feel, and act.... His recent research has focused on using knowledge gained from cross-cultural comparisons to improve people?s decision making and to increase their support for collectively beneficial public policies.

Alas, I?m afraid Prof. Savani and his research are not only real but in the mainstream of how social psychology is all too often practiced today. His blithe but revealing assumption that ?affirmative action, a tax on fuel-inefficient cars, or banning violent video games? are ?collectively beneficial public policies? and hence that people who oppose them are ?less sympathetic to others and less likely to support policies that help people? shows him to be a member in good standing of what University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt called (as I discussed on Minding The Campus) the ?tribal moral community? of social psychologists today, a tribe with shared ??sacred values? that hinder research and damage their credibility ? and blind them to the hostile climate they?ve created for non-liberals.?

Despite the findings of Prof. Savani?s research, I?m confident in concluding that at least one choice we have remains beneficial to both individuals and society: the choice to laugh at this research.

Full post as published by Discriminations on March 30, 2011 (boomark / email).