The odd overlap of political left and right that’s associated with much of “neoliberal” social science

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Merve Emre wrote this review on the twentieth anniversary of the book, Emotional Intelligence, and her review touched on a bunch of things I’ve been trying to say for awhile, in particular the odd overlap of political left and right that’s associated with much of “neoliberal” social science. (I put the term “neoliberal” in quotes because, like everybody else, I hate the expression but I’ll use it here for convenience.)

I first started to think about this political issue in the context of the business school professor and plagiarist Karl Weick. It struck me that Weick’s idea that “any map will do” combines some of the unappealing features of discourse on the political left and right. Associated with the left, there is a mindless all-things-are-possible-if-we-wish-hard-enough attitude, an embrace of unrealism and an anti-scientific attitude, magic words and jargon (“sensemaking”) in place of rigorous thought. Associated with the right, there is the principle of “leadership,” which seems to come down to giving comforting messages to bosses justifying their positions and telling them they should continue to act like they know what they’re doing at all times.

Here’s what Basbøll and I wrote in our article, “When Do Stories Work? Evidence and Illustration in the Social Sciences”:

We conclude with some comments on political ideology. Storytelling has been championed by a wide range of scholars who would like to escape the confines of rigor. On the academic left, storytelling is sometimes viewed as a humane alternative to the impersonal number crunching of economists, while the academic right uses stories to connect to worldly business executives who have neither the time nor patience for dry scholasticism. Karl Weick seems to us to express an unstable mix of these attitudes, championing the creative humanism of story-based social reasoning while offering his theories as useful truths for the business world.

Or as Emre puts it:

In pop psychology, such blindness is elevated to the first principle of craft, in a way that conceals the link between the psychological and the political. The genre’s preferred method of narration is the parable.

That’s interesting, as one of my themes with Basbøll is the distinction between what we call “stories,” which are real and immutable, with “parables,” which by being flexible allow any message to be drawn, and which correspondingly lack the immutability that would allow us to reject our preconceptions of the world. See discussion here in the context of the notorious “smallish town” example. You could say that the work of disgraced food researcher Brian Wansink is a series of parables: these articles exist to demonstrate pre-existing points that Wansink wanted to make; they did not provide new information that would help us learn or alter our theories of the world. That’s what happens when people take data or anecdotes and strain out all their fiber.

None of this is new, and similar things have been said about business-friendly happy talk back in the era of How to Win Friends and Influence People and The Power of Positive Thinking. The political implications of junk science is important enough that I think we should keep talking about it, so I appreciated Emre’s review, and I’d be interested in seeing takes on this topic from the political right as well.

P.S. I don’t know if I’d go all the way with Emre in her criticism of Emotional Intelligence—I’ve never read the book myself, but I do feel that the phrase, “emotional intelligence,” is useful in expressing the idea that there is this form of intelligence that’s different from logical problem-solving or whatever you want to call what’s usually called intelligence. So, without commenting on the book at all, let alone its various spin-offs which are amusingly discussed in Emre’s review, I like the introduction of that phrase into our discourse.

42 thoughts on “The odd overlap of political left and right that’s associated with much of “neoliberal” social science”

  1. In his 1978 paper, “Theoretical Risks and Tabular Asterisks…”, Paul Meehl references, SOCIAL SCIENCES AS SORCERY, a book by Andreski. It’s been a while since I read the book (or, sadly, the Meehl paper), but I remember appreciating the way that Andreski likened the work of modern social scientists to that of pre-modern sages and astrologers — coming up with clever stories that tended to reinforce social authorities. I’m not sure that the criticism is entirely fair to the sages and astrologers (I’ll leave it to the historians to weigh-in on that), but as a practicing clinical psychologist, I do think it’s a fair criticism of social scientists — especially those who develop and promote pop, positive, person-centered pablum that is meant to address real-world problems, but so often ignores structural features of society that underlie these very problems. If it’s not obvious, I direct at least some of this criticism towards myself. At least I have Meeh (and Andreski) to keep me humble.

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    • Keith:

      Yes, indeed, self-help-style psychology advice is vaguely “leftist” in that it focuses on personal empowerment rather than societal roles and vaguely “rightist” in that it implicitly supports existing power structures (if you’re not a success it’s your fault). Another example is evolutionary psychology, which by bring up evolution at all is kind of leftist in being opposed to traditional religion and again is kind of rightist in providing a justification for the-world-as-it-is.

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      • Andrew –

        > Yes, indeed, self-help-style psychology advice is vaguely “leftist” in that it focuses on personal empowerment rather than societal roles and vaguely “rightist” in that it implicitly supports existing power structures (if you’re not a success it’s your fault).

        I don’t exactly disagree, but I think it’s more complicated.

        Maybe what you’re describing was once more true than now, but now self-help psychology is extremely popular on “the right,” explicitly focused on and in support of “personal empowerment” (fighting against those statists at the CDC for example).

        And that messaging on “the right” is explicitly focused on fighting against existing power structures.

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  2. If you spend much time in the rightwing/IDW pod-o-sphere, you will see plenty linkage to self-help messaging, which is linked to rightwing (and IDW) ideology.

    For example with the big kahuna, Joe Rogan and his whole ivermectin and vitamins and keto and workout solution for COVID (he actually uses the term “protocol” to describe his COVID advice, that he recommends to friends and dispenses to millions on his pods) .

    And of course, Alex Jones.

    Jordan Peterson’s daughter has a meat-only diet (I kid you not) that she hawks on her pods. Jordan’s a proponent also.

    Bret Weinstein with his anti-braces for children…

    Sam Harris and his commercial enterprise selling his Buddhism products.

    Jocko Willink…

    Not to say there aren’t similar phenomena on the left. I have no idea of their prevalence, respectively. I see no particular reason why this should be distributed disproportionately in association with ideology. Imo, such a view would likely get the direction of causality wrong.

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  3. Your comment on sensemaking — ‘magic words and jargon (“sensemaking”)’ –is interesting. I’ve always thought of sensemaking as the the psychologists’ version of exploratory data analysis, at least when it comes to the individual focused formulation of it from Pirolli and Card and others. It has had a lot of impact on information visualization/human computer interaction, similar to the idea of EDA. Makes me wonder what Weick’s influence was, if at all, on its popularity outside of organizational theory.

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    • Jessica:

      I don’t know. The first time I’d ever heard the term “sensemaking” was from the horrible work of Weick, and so the term has negative associations for me, combining unpleasant anti-reality attitudes on the left (“any old map will do”) with unpleasant stroking-the-powerful attitudes on the right (extolling management “leadership”). Sensemaking could well be associated with good things too!

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    • Great point Jessica, I think the line between exploratory sensemaking (more akin to situations with ambiguity, equivocality, multiple meanings etc.) gets theoretically blurred with more postmodern frameworks where no “truth” has precedence over another.

      More generally Prof. Gelman. The trend I have seen in my decade in academia is the split between agency and structure. If you so much as hint at individual agency/ choice, you’re considered a right-winger; conversely if you’re always going on about structures (power usually) you’re usually a lefty. There are few things that will mark you as a member of the outgroup in many academic disciplines than focusing on things that enhance people’ individual agency (discipline, grit, hard work etc.). This split is very obvious in the New Yorker book review you linked.

      The broader puzzle I have not been able to figure out is: How do the believers in multiple interpretations – usually coming from the European critical style (Frankfurt school etc.) that focuses on social construction in everything – reconcile these multiple interpretations with their strong activist bent? I.e., if your qualitative analysis is just one of many, what external validity does it have?

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      • Agency can be trendy in Anglo academe if its the agency of all the people other than the Great Settler Men. There is tension though: many historians of science are very dogmatic that innovations come from countless numberless researchers and not single geniuses, and that does discourage talk of agency. The fields of research I know best are so small that its clear to me that single researchers have had a big impact, but maybe fields like astronomy are different.

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        • “innovations come from countless numberless researchers and not single geniuses”

          Thankfully academia is vigilant in protecting the public lest any possibly independent minded geniuses enter its ranks.

        • Sean & Anon., you’re both right. That’s the classic distinction between normal science and paradigm shift that Kuhn articulated. If your salary is paid by normal science, you’re probably not very keen on paradigm shifts that upset the apple cart, and require you to relearn fundamental premises of your field – not to mention, paradigm shifts potentially make the old guards seniority and experience irrelevant.

        • Chetan:

          There’s a complication, though: “Normal science” from a sociological standpoint (the science that is being paid for by normal sources, published in normal journals, etc.) can be “revolutionary science” from a Kuhnean standpoint (ideas that overturn existing paradigms). Just for example, I teach in the Ivy League and have been continuously supported by the U.S. government for decades—you can’t get more “insider” than that—but I worked on paradigm shifts such as the integration of statistical modeling with exploratory data analysis, shifting from type 1 and 2 errors to type M and S errors, etc. Or, to take a different example, researchers paid by sociologically normal science have developed revolutionary ideas such as deep learning.

          One reason this can happen is that everybody knows about Kuhn and everyone wants to be a revolutionary. I expect that the lowliest hacks publishing N=20 studies in Psychological Science and PNAS see themselves as bold revolutionaries overturning the tired work of the past. And what could be more revolutionary than claiming that Cornell students have extra-sensory perception?

          In short, the usual (“normal”) sources of funding are actually paying us to do revolutionary science—as NSF puts it, “transformative” research.

        • Certainly, its a very interesting empirical question: how many paradigm shifts come from people embedded in the normal science paradigm? I’d wager its a bigger proportion than most of us realize. But it doesn’t change the fact that most of us are engaged in normal science (I count myself in it, albeit at a much more junior level) most of the time.

          However, even the scientists within the establishment who come up with paradigm shifting hypotheses probably face more than their share of blowback for challenging the status quo. The classic case that comes to mind is the ridicule Barry Marshall (Nobel laureate in Medicine) faced when he proposed H. pylori as cause of peptic ulcers and cancers. So perhaps a better model to think about this is not as two separate groups (occasional outliers notwithstanding), but as people creating these paradigm shifts as they go about working on edge cases.

        • Chetan: I think this gets into the issues that Kuhn never really defined the distinction between revolutionary and normal science. He spent the rest of his career trying and failing to turn “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” from a long essay into a more rigorous argument. From my point of view, the study of Iran before Alexander was revolutionized in the 1980s by about three scholars who organized a series of workshops and published their proceedings, and one scholar who single-handedly synthesized the work of the various contributors in the 1990s. They were certainly responding to decolonization, postwar French philosophy, the Iranian Revolution, and the publication of new bodies of evidence, but they used this situation to found a successful academic movement which reflected their peculiar interests. Their project could easily have failed, or other people could have become the leading figures. But whether it was “normal” or “revolutionary” is a big question!

        • Sean: I think this gets into the issues that Kuhn never really defined the distinction between revolutionary and normal science. He spent the rest of his career trying and failing to turn “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” from a long essay into a more rigorous argument.

          First of all I think it’s not obvious that Kuhn gives a particularly useful insight into the nature of science especially with respect to contemporary science, even if he’s a good read and easy to follow. The fact that there isn’t a particularly authoritative and widely known modern philosophy of science (more modern that Kuhn’s 60 year old book*) possibly relates to the fact that science and doing science is actually quite easy to understand. So once you decide on a problem worth exploring you find out what’s known, interact with the tools and facilities available, design experiments and use a handful of epistemic tools: common sense, hypotheses should be falsfiable, Occam’s razor (in the original formulation “Don’t multiply causes” rather than the common interpretation “choose the simplest model”), as well as some consideration of statistical reliability – also throw in some helpful personality traits especially “good faith” and “honesty”.

          It’s not really that difficult. School kids working in the lab during the break between end school and going to Uni get it immediately. There are obviously some aspects of doing science worth teaching nowadays that weren’t taught much in the past (for example, and possibly sadly, instructions on plagiarism and scientific integrity but also how science fits within societies) and courses on philosophy and history of science are really good for budding, and not so budding, scientists.

          But all science is “normal science” I would say and it’s not obvious that there’s such a thing as “revolutionary science” as something that one engages in (rather than reconstructs with hindsight). Actually Kuhn discusses this in his “The Invisibility of Revolutions” chapter : (“Scientists are not, of course, the only group that tends to see its discipline’s past developing linearly towards its present vantage. The temptation to write history backwards is both omnipresent and perennial”).

          Of course one might recognize at some point during one’s studies that they’ve made a discovery that is potentially revolutionary (e.g. Watson and Crick on the structure of DNA; Peter Mitchell on the chemiosmotic theory etc.) But I don’t think anyone devises a programme of study that they consider is revolutionary (“Everyone’s doing normal science but I’m going to do revolutionary science”!). If it was that easy then everyone would do it!, although as Andrew alluded to above that’s in fact the hope of most scientists.

          *David Wooton’s “The Invention of Science” is a fantastic tour de force IMO but not a philosophy of science.

        • Perhaps the only “scientists” doing knowingly “revolutionary science” are the “armchair scientists” determining that global warming is bunk, vaccines don’t work and the structure of DNA is wrong :)

        • Chris:

          Back when I was teaching at the University of California, one of the faculty invited a notorious HIV/AIDS denier to speak in our statistics seminar. I had mixed feelings about this. On one hand, you don’t want to suppress any views, and getting it out in the open allowed for criticism (an actual epidemiologist showed up to the audience to dispute his arguments); on the other hand, there’s a selection bias in which fringe ideas get a hearing in the first place.

        • Chris:

          Yeah, that’s who it was. The whole experience was weird. On one hand, my colleagues there showed very little respect for my own work, sometimes lying about it, other times casually insulting it. At the same time, they were acting super-respectful to this sleazy contrarian. Not that being rude to him would’ve solved any problems. It just made me aware that there’s no easy solution to the marketplace-of-ideas problem.

        • A friend of mine had Duesberg for bio lecture 3 and a half years ago. As far as I can tell, the man cannot be cancelled, the left wing mind control conspiracy notwithstanding.

        • Chris: I actually made a point of citing a recent textbook on philosophy of science next to Kuhn in my 2018 Doktorarbeit. I think there is an important difference between fiddling with the Standard Model in the 2010s, and Wegener proposing plate tectonics to gradualists and the odd catastrophalist, but its hard to create a clear definition of what is “normal” and what is “revolutionary.”

  4. I see plenty of bad thinking on the left and on the right, but is there any good evidence that the center does better? My impression is that clear thinking is hard, independently of political orientation.

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    • Maybe there is evidence. I mean, suppose at the moment the extreme right in the US can be characterized by people who think COVID is caused by 5g cell towers, vaccines contain tracker chips, and Trump is a messiah of sorts who will bring prosperity if we just hand over the keys to let him be a dictator… and that the extreme left thinks that giving everyone “free” (govt paid) education from K through PhD, setting a 90% marginal tax rate on earnings over $1M/yr and raising the minimum wage to $30/hr would all be purely consequence free in terms of economic productivity or GDP but dramatically improve the lives of most people especially the poor…

      if you’re in the center, you’re a person who doesn’t believe in these “fairy tale” ideas, and instead has some more nuanced view of things… That’s indicative that you’re doing “better” (not necessarily genius level, but at least better than the wingers).

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      • ““free” (govt paid) education from K through PhD, setting a 90% marginal tax rate on earnings over $1M/yr and raising the minimum wage to $30/hr would all be purely consequence free in terms of economic productivity or GDP but dramatically improve the lives of most people especially the poor…”

        This pretty well describes the most successful social democracies in Europe. And by successful I mean objectively higher well-being for the average citizen than we Americans enjoy.

        The real head scratcher is why people who are not oligarchs are so committed to oligarchy as the only means of full productivity. Is it really so hard to imagine a world in which workers take home 30% of the wealth they generate rather than the starvation wages of 10% that unskilled American workers currently get?

        All that aside….Merry Christmas!

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        • +1

          I will also note that up until the early 1960’s, the maximum marginal tax rate in the US was 91%, and productivity was booming back then. And while we didn’t have government paid education from K through PhD back then, we did have it for K through 12 (and still do, of course) and in that era a high school diploma was more than sufficient for a person to earn a comfortable middle-class living, as could many who didn’t complete high school. Now, you’re locked out of most decently paying jobs without a college degree, but you’re on your own (or, worse, at the mercy of the modern-day version of loan sharks) to finance that.

        • I will also note that up until the early 1960’s, the maximum marginal tax rate in the US was 91%, and productivity was booming back then.

          How much tax revenue was generated from this?

        • “How much tax revenue was generated from this?”

          What has that got to do with productivity? Got something to say about the topic?

          Scratching my head again.

        • I think the point is that no one actually paid that rate, there were bazillions of loopholes and tax protection schemes that prevented it from occurring. I’ve read that actual marginal rates at that time were dramatically lower but I can’t seem to easily google up those references.

        • @Daniel

          Yes, that is what I’ve seen before but I was wondering if there was some accepted source of data on this.

          Actually, wouldn’t surprise me if thst 91% tax rate actually decreased the taxes collected, then you could argue that is why “productivity was booming”.

          It is just a silly statement in so many ways, including the implicit acknowledgement of correlation != causation.

        • Note that I don’t say in my post that overall it’s necessarily a bad idea, just that some people believe that they can set policy based on current numbers and that the change in policy will have basically no effect on those numbers.

          Also $1M a year is a dramatically lower breakpoint than the highest rate in the 1960’s. Married filing jointly hit that bracket at 400k in 1963 and that’s CPI inflated about 3.6M today

          https://taxfoundation.org/taxes-on-the-rich-1950s-not-high/
          https://taxfoundation.org/historical-income-tax-rates-brackets/

        • It’s amazing that educated people quote “workers share” of the “wealth ‘they’ generate” as a useful measure of anything. Aside from being at best a poorly defined aggregate statistic, “workers” don’t generate wealth.

          What “share” of the wealth of Amazon do warehouse workers “generate” – vs the management practices and capital that put them there in the first place? When workers are replaced by automation, what “share” of the wealth does the automation generate? Who’s responsible for that wealth? The robot? The software engineers? The capital that paid for the equipment? The miners who extracted the materials? The engineers who designed the equipment that extracted, refined and shipped the materials? The workers who built the transportation system? The taxpayers who funded it?

          “Workers” – as in laborers – don’t generate any wealth. We can move rocks back and forth all day with labor and no wealth is generated. Even capital doesn’t generate wealth: without technological innovation, there is no wealth, we’re all just squirrels stashing nuts.

        • That’s right, Daniel! To suggest otherwise is as risible as suggesting Michael Jordan created a lot of points for the Chicago Bulls, whereas in fact it was Jerry Reinsdorf.

        • Let me get this straight:

          I have an idea for a new type of high efficiency combustion engine. The moment I have that idea—then the wealth is already generated. The engine has never been made, but we are already wealthier. Two years later, the engine is put into production, and every car produced from that year forward is 10x more efficient. This generates no wealth; we have the same level of wealth as we did 2 years ago right after I had the idea.

          Onwards, you march towards a philosophy totally disconnected from any material reality, I guess.

        • This reads like someone read the abstract of the Solow growth model, then 10 years later tried to summarize it while really high at a libertarian convention afterparty.

    • John –

      > My impression is that clear thinking is hard, independently of political orientation.

      I agree. I think there’s little evidence that clear thinking is a function of, or associated with, ideological orientation. Why would it be?

      Motivated reasoning might be associated with the intensity of ideological orientation. But (1) a lack of motivated reasoning doesn’t necessarily imply clear-headed thinking and (2) there are plenty of people who are strongly identified with being in “the center.”

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  5. “How To Win Friends and Influence People” is actually full of useful practical advice. To most people that advice is extremely obvious, but it’s relevant for those of us who are more socially inept.

    “Try to remember people’s names.” “Don’t get in weird pedantic arguments with strangers at social events.” “Let people save face when they’re wrong.” All solid advice that makes life easier, not pretending to be anything other than folksy anecdotes, very far from the pseudoscience of later self-help imitators. I wish our airport book industry would go back to this style.

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    • It’s a great book! But it’s also nearly a century-long best-seller – originally published in 1936!! – so it can’t be for only people who are socially inept. All of us get caught up in our own hyperfocused narratives at times and forget the simple things. This book is a great reminder of how to be aware of others’ sensibilities.

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  6. On the very first day of my freshman year in college eons ago, I was assigned T. C. Chamberlin’s classic essay on multiple working hypotheses. (Ironically by a professor who, I later learned, was one of the last holdouts against plate tectonics.) This left a big impression, and I still believe in the value of stories that potentially make sense of data, provided they do not too greatly bias the acquisition of new data. Entertaining multiple stories is one of the best ways to do this.

    I think the tendency to get attached to a story in a more limiting way is kind of baked in for us humans; we are hermeneutic creatures. It’s always a battle to keep the mind open for new learning. So I’m not surprised that the left and right have their characteristic ways of succumbing to their own stories, nor would I expect the middle of the spectrum (if it’s one-dimensional, which it isn’t) to be any better.

    Two examples on the left. (1) For a long time there was the Marxist story in its various formulations. Marxist theorizing serves very well as a generator of working hypothesis a la Chamberlin, but is far too narrow to do the job all by itself. (2) Then there was a revolt against Marxism on the left, which was also a direct political struggle in France at the time (the 60s), when the French Communist Party owned the parliamentary left. That took the form, not of a critique of Marxism itself, but a revolt against the category of “master narratives”. Politics was transferred to the realm of cultural-critique-of-narrative, and arguments were supported or rejected depending on whether their implicit narrative was counter-hegemonic, decentering, hybridizing, etc. Empirical evidence was sifted to find support for the “right” narratives. This tendency is ongoing, i.e. Graeber/Wengrow Dawn of Everything. (The comment thread on Crooked Timber’s first DoE post is fascinating in this regard.)

    On the right, there is a tendency to think in terms of eternal principles that hold or should hold across history and geography. This can show up in the form of natural law, Social Darwinism, or the eternal philosophy of occidentalists like the Straussians. They often take the form of exemplary stories, and again empirical evidence is secondary.

    But the center is also awash with similar tropes/stories, one of which is about the opposition between moderation and extremism (or “defense” and terrorism).

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