SIO303: Are the Woke Left and Alt-Right Alike? AKA Debunking a Garbage Quillette Article About a Garbage Study

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:11 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode 303. I'm Thomas, and I'm on the far left, and that's Lindsey, and she's on the far right, and we're alike!

0:00:23 Lindsey: More like than either of us realized.

0:00:25 Thomas: Okay, yeah, you're right. For the joke to work, I guess I... And I don't realize we're alike! And then from there... No, that's not true. We're both far right. Anyway, um...

0:00:36 Lindsey: Yeah, we're gonna find out. We're gonna take some scales on air, I think, and see if we're far left or far right.

0:00:42 Thomas: Oh, that's gonna be fun anyway,

0:00:46 Lindsey: Yeah. Not

0:00:47 Thomas: The esteemed Dr. Lindsey Osterman, how you doing?

0:00:50 Lindsey: Mad. Am mad, though. I'm pretty mad. There's gonna be some yelling here.

0:00:56 Thomas: You know someone did a bad science thingy when Lindsay's voice does not at all indicate that she's mad, but her words indicate that he's mad about it, that's how you know someone, someone did, did a bad science. Well, it must relate to this article I sent you from Quillette, which I, you know, I can't imagine that anybody doesn't know this that listens to the show, but Quillette is obviously the, I wonder what, what would you call it exactly? It's sort of the IDW rag, you know? And, and they, they do a few things, you. For one, they do outright just kind of right wing, you science-y type stuff. And then they, sometimes they do an act where they're like, well, we're really on the left, but here's why the left sucks. You know, like they do some of that content.

0:01:05 Lindsey: Yeah mm-hmmm mm-hm mm-hmm yeah

0:01:45 Thomas: It's like, it's like Dave Rubin, the publication, basically, except probably, except I don't think Dave Ruben reads a whole lot. And I feel like these people who write these articles, they at least read to try to make their racist and right wing points, often, so I'll give it that. Yeah.

0:01:46 Lindsey: I think that's right yeah No, I think they're in that camp that's like, you know, both the left and the right are wrong, the real answer is always in the middle, that kind of attitude. Um, yes

0:02:11 Thomas: Which they say it's the middle, but that's actually the right. The left and right are always wrong, here's the real answer, it's in the middle, except it's right wing, is what, yeah, I think that's that's Dave Rubin in a nutshell. And then Dave Rubin will do one day, maybe Quillette will do what Dave Rubin did. Did you see this clip? Did I, oh man, did we we talk about this? There's a, a clip from a few months back in which Dave Rubin was at some sort of event, you know, and he was doing his quote on, I think he was during his quote unquote standup, or it was a conservative event, and know when he was at it and doing some sort of opening routine, and he gets to the point where he has this line, and then he says, "And I'm not afraid to admit that I am a conservative."

0:02:15 Lindsey: Exactly. Yep Okay.

0:02:54 Thomas: And then he literally does, I'm not even joking, I wish I could find the clip, I can't find it short notice, but it's out there, I've seen it, he literally does a Jeb "please clap." He seriously goes, "I am," because he was like, wow, I thought that would be a, be an applause line, cause he he thought this was some big like admission, that he was like, "we all knew, man, we all already even conservatives were like, yeah, we know, what we know you're conservative, it's obvious, everybody knows you're a conservative," he seriously thought and so he tried to do some joke to cover it up of like, oh, it's because we've all been in covid so long we don't understand how audiences work, yeah, you're supposed to clap at stuff.

So, anyway, maybe, maybe Quillette will do that someday. Hey guys, we're conservative. Yeah, no, I know. Cricket, cricket sound, you know, like, yeah, we know that we already know that. Anyway, all this is to say there's a Quillett article that I came across and as frequently as the case here, something, you Know, get shared and get shared. And then I find out it's a year old, but whatever, it's still worth debunking. Cause it'll come, it'll come up at some other time.

And the article is called The Woke Left Versus the Alt-Right. A new study shows they're more alike than either side realizes. And there are a lot of centrist-y people who share that. Yeah, I knew it, they say. You know, they share it. They're like, no surprises here. So, Lindsay, any surprises here?

0:03:25 Lindsey: Little sad. God.

0:03:36 Lindsey: He's so not funny. I've heard clips from his stand-up, he's got no timing, it's terrible, there's Some surprises, yeah, yeah. So the the central thesis, and they they capture this in the Quillette article fairly well, is that people who are high on authoritarianism are the real problem, regardless of whether the content of their views is left or right wing. And in this article they imply that this, this study, this research study assessed authoritarianism, and they didn't. So that's cool. Oh,

0:04:50 Thomas: So, already, the fact that you're already dishing that little nugget tells me there's a lot of bad science to go around. You weren't like, you didn't build us up to that at all. You weren'T like, give us a 20 minute slow burn to that factoid. Okay.

0:04:57 Lindsey: Yeah no yeah I mean, we're gonna get into a lot of, the I'm gonna support that claim, by the way, but yeah, I can't, I can't hold it in, there's... there's too much that's wrong with with what they did here. Um, but anyway, I mean, this, so this isn't a new argument, you know, either in the cultural conversation or in the academic literature, right-wing authoritarianism, it's a psychological construct with actually, like, decades of research on it. And in response, there has been more research that was conducted sort of in reaction on left-wing authoritarianism, because both sides, right?

0:05:34 Lindsey: And so there's a quote from an article that's sort of defending this view that left- wing authoritarianism is just as big of a problem as right-wing. So they say, quote, "left-wing authoritarianism resembles right-wing authoritarianism in being characterized by high levels of dogmatism, punitive attitudes toward dissenters, and desire for strong authority figures. What distinguishes left-wing authoritarianism from right-wing authoritarianism is the content of the dogmatically defended values. So for individuals high in left-wing authoritarianism, these values include pro-environment and anti-racist and anti sexist beliefs and a rejection of Christian moral restrictions."

0:06:11 Thomas: Okay. So things that we should obviously all be dogmatic about. Okay. Gotcha.

0:06:14 Lindsey: Yes exactly right, yeah, yeah, and so again, the the the

0:06:15 Thomas: Yeah. Things like don't kill people or like you're all dogmatic about your belief that we shouldn't be racist. So you're the same as the Nazis. You know, you

0:06:20 Lindsey: Yes right yep exactly, both sides bad people on both sides, that's right

0:06:30 Thomas: Know who else was dogmatic? The Nazis. Same side. Can I just say, in starting this article, it was off to a bad start instantly because I I tend to click the links in articles like this. It's funny. If it's like the New York Times, often I'll just kind of read the article and I don't to click the links as I'm trying to read the articles. With something like Quillette, I click the links because I know they're almost always going to be terrible. It's hilarious. They do a thing and bad journalism does a thing where you have the linked part of the sentence. And I think in the reader's mind, and they're counting on this, they'll be like, oh, that is supporting the claim that I'm making.

0:06:33 Lindsey: Exactly um yeah, no, so so of course like that's yeah that's just a signifier of evidence, right?

0:07:12 Thomas: Yep, yep. And then with these articles, often you click on them and in recent, especially with recent stuff we've been debunking, you'll click on it and it's like a tweet from James Lindsay saying like the same thing. Like that's not how supporting your argument works. That's just another guy, a worse guy saying the same things. But the first one, the first link is, you know, okay. How about I read the first sentence? Common criticism of the ultra progressive left is that the culture war, its culture warriors now resemble the right wing ideological enforcers of your excommunicating those deemed to have sin or performed heresies. So the excommunicating is is a link. And one would assume this is like a bunch of left-wing canceled people. Well, it turns out that link is just a database of quote unquote, everyone canceled ever. And the top result, I don't know what the ordering is. The third result, like I was just like, okay, is this going to be like all left-wind people canceled? Third result, Liz Cheney, who you may remember was canceled by the woke for now was

0:07:25 Lindsey: Yeah. Nope. That's

0:08:17 Thomas: Removed from house leadership by Republicans for not worshiping Trump enough and agreeing with the January 6th attack. Like, so result number three is a very, very prominent and consequential, uh, Republican example. And, uh、 know, I went through some of the other ones and this is the other thing that we've we've covered on here is that every time you dig into these stories it'll be like well this person like you know sexually assaulted someone and then had you know like a bad tweet about them they're like see the left is canceling people um So Yes, That's that supporting that claim is a database of everyone who's ever had anything like just a whole database of people. And it seems to be, you know, again, one of the top examples in the database was Liz Cheney canceled by Republicans. So we're off to a bad start is all I'm saying.

0:08:27 Lindsey: Weird. Going too far. Yeah.

0:09:11 Lindsey: Yeah, exactly. And that brings up an important point, I think, because, you know, there have, of course, been like left wing authoritarian states in history. And that's true. But that is never the issue. When you hear this claim made and outlets like Quillette and stuff, they're always talking about when they say that the left's going too far, they're almost always talking about like very mainstream kind of progressive values and not cancelling often and it's just, I don't know. And that's actually, I don't know, it's very relevant to some of the problems that ended up presenting themselves in this research. So this article, this research article, uh, this is by Jordan Moss and Peter O'Connor. It was published in 2020 and the title, love it, is the dark triad predicts, uh, or dark triads traits predict authoritarian political correctness and alt-right attitudes. Don't know, authoritarian political correctness. I mean, does that, how does that sit with you?

0:09:19 Thomas: Mm-hmm.

0:10:05 Thomas: There another kind of political correctance or, okay, what's the other kind?

0:10:07 Lindsey: Ooh, there is. So, yeah, we'll get into this more in the methods, but they have two measures of facets of political correctness that they present in this paper. And one of them is called political correctless liberalism. And the other one is called critical correctness authoritarianism. I'm interested in hearing your predictions about what you think PC authoritarianism might look like. Like if it's a real construct, what do you think that looks like?

0:10:35 Thomas: Well, okay. I think that in, look, I'll already just forget all this nonsense happening, it is true that there seem to be people who are more authoritarian or like, I guess, more intolerant of any sort of disagreement and less intolerant of disagreement. And I think it depends on what that's about. You know, like in some ways that could be great. And in some ways that can be really frustrating. You know, if we're just quibbling over very minor things, it's frustrating. If we're talking about like, well, actually, I just have no tolerance for, you people who are racist. Sure, that's your that's you're right. That makes sense. That's a belief that I would expect people to be pretty passionate about. So I don't know, you know, like I don'T if there's a measure of those things that's going to OK, I guess what I'm saying is how do you separate any of that from what what the beliefs actually are. Like that seems really difficult to me.

0:10:56 Lindsey: Sure.

0:11:32 Lindsey: Yeah. And so one way that this has been handled in past research, because like I mentioned, there are scales of left-wing and right-wing authoritarianism. And what they usually do is they take a sampling of left and right wing beliefs. But they frame it as like, is it appropriate for there to be like state sanctions for, you know, X behaviors or whatever it is? And yeah, so they are sort of tapping into ideas of intolerance, but also sort of looking for top-down authorities to regulate people's behavior, right?

0:11:51 Thomas: Okay. Okay, yeah. And so I would rate as authoritarian on vaccines easily. I think that we should make people take the COVID vaccine. And I think if not that, I think we should at least have zero tolerance for vaccine misinformation because it's too important and it's killing hundreds of thousands, millions of these, but so like, I guess I would rate as authoritarian on that.

0:12:06 Lindsey: Right. Yeah.

0:12:29 Thomas: So I'm the alt-right, Lindsay. The same.

0:12:30 Lindsey: Exactly. So yeah, so we're the same, exactly. Yeah, so I, you know, there was going in like reading the Quillette summary of this, I was thinking, okay, so like there could be some version of PC authoritarianism, which, you know, when I think PC, I think about, you know, know, regulating language, making sure that people aren't causing offense. So PC authoritarianism, I would think, like, okay, so people should be like murdered for saying offensive things or something, or they should go to jail for that, or, you know, things along those lines. Um, so there, there's a, there's version of this I think that could have made for an interesting study, and actually my husband and I were, I was ranting about this last night after, as I do, and I, we were, were saying, like, there's a version of this study that would be really cool to actually do instead

0:12:43 Thomas: Which, Okay.

0:13:14 Lindsey: Of what these authors did, which was not do their study. So, So usually when I break down these research papers, I go in the order of a research report, which means you start with a theoretical background, hypotheses, then you talk about methods, and then you talk about the results and how the authors interpreted them. I want to do this slightly out of order for reasons that I think will become clear. So I'm going to start with a theoretical background and hypotheses. Then I'm going to jump right to what they said they found.

And then we're going to spend the rest of the time talking about these scales that they use to measure their constructs. And boy, is there a lot to talk about. This is going to be fun. So, okay. So here's an overview of the logic to their introduction, right? Where they're setting up the theory in the background. So start by talking about how extreme political attitudes on both sides are becoming more prevalent based on some articles that they've, like, popular press articles or news articles they've read, and a Google search, I guess. Um, and so they say that these attitudes are becoming more prevalent, and that they're linked to violent behavior on

0:13:33 Thomas: Okay, sure, okay. Oh,

0:14:12 Lindsey: Both sides. Yeah, well, we'll see.

0:14:12 Thomas: Are they? You had me until the violent behavior. I don't know.

0:14:15 Lindsey: Yeah, no, we'll see. Um, and then they also talk about the fact that these personality characteristics that are called the, the dark triad of personality characteristics, so we'll talk about these in more detail in a little bit, but these are Machiavellianism, which is like this calculating manipulativeness, uh, narcissism, which we talked about last week, and psychopathy, um, which is related to, like, it's like the personality version of, like, uh, APD type traits, or antisocial personality disorder type traits. Um, so they, they talk about the fact that personality characteristics like those, like the dark triad, are strongly associated with antisocial and violent behavior. And so, since the dark triad is associated with violence, and extreme political attitudes on both sides are associated with violent, maybe political extremism is associated with the dark triad. And that's what's going to motivate the study.

0:15:05 Thomas: I mean, okay, if you want to check that, fine. Give it a try. See if that might be right.

0:15:06 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah, right. Why not? Like this, this could be a cute little short report on personality, essentially, which Is what I was expecting, interacting. So, um, so let's let's talk about a couple of the key points in this introduction that I think are worth highlighting. So, so again, they start by talking about this large area of research examining relationships between personality traits and political ideology, and there is a lot of research on that, um, but what they note is that most of this literature focuses on mainstream attitudes, like mainstream political attitudes, and sort of normative personality characteristics. And it neglects important political attitudes falling outside of the traditional continuum, so political extremism, essentially. And they go on to say that this is an important gap to fill because political extremist is becoming more prevalent and is linked with violent behavior on both sides. So, for example, they say that, quote, "This is particularly relevant today with increasing reports of the alt-left or regressive left and the alt-right or alt-right."

0:15:17 Thomas: Mm hmm. Yeah.

0:16:09 Lindsey: And then they go on to say recent polling data suggests a population level shift from moderate political views to more extreme nontraditional attitudes. And they cite a Pew Research poll in support of this from 2014, indicating that Americans are becoming more politically politically polarized, one would think.

0:16:26 Thomas: 2014. I feel like you could find better stuff than that, there's been a lot done on polarization in the wake of Trump, like, huh, okay, and like, okay already, I, I could agree with many things here, like, I do feel like we're becoming more polarized, although there's, you know, we got to talk about that, I think that you, the right is moving further right than the left is moving left, but whatever, and like I also think that it's, it's a matter of scale here, you know, I Don't know what you're going to tell me this the study is, but if the study shows that the most extreme, I don't know, 12 people on either side are like totally nuts, then yeah, I could believe that. Like, sure. Yeah. I don't, uh, yeah, I'm sure somebody there's a, you know, there's Nazis on one side and the other side, there might be like, I dunno, extreme left, uh, eco terrorists who have done murdered people.

I don't, maybe probably, but it depends on what kind of scale we talking about. Are we talking talking about like, it depends also on how many people occupy each end of these scales, you know, and it also, I think, is important how much power they actually have in the real world and in our political system, but all those things aside, yeah,

0:16:30 Lindsey: No kidding. Yeah. Sure.

0:16:49 Lindsey: Yeah, no, not all those things. Those are all like incredibly important points. And man, there's a lot to pick out of that what you just said. So one thing is like there are implicit claims here about prevalence, right? And prevalence of people occupying like truly extreme positions On the left and the right. What this Pew poll actually shows is that people are becoming less mixed in their positions. So there's more people that hold consistently left-wing or consistently right-wing attitudes, but what it's not assessing is whether there are growing numbers of the most extreme form of the right-wing and the most extreme form of the left-wing.

0:17:51 Thomas: Yeah.

0:18:13 Lindsey: That's not what the poll was showing.

0:18:12 Thomas: That makes sense. Okay. Yeah.

0:18:15 Lindsey: And so I think this is a little bit distorted, also like, so you, you're, you pick you picked up on this idea of like just the making these claims about prevalence in general, right? People are becoming, there's more extremists, there's a growing number of extremists, they don't test that at all, yeah, they in fact they don't even provide like basic descriptive statistics that would allow me to evaluate whether that's true, even if they don' focus on it, they literally provide no data about prevalence, which is central to their claims.

0:18:20 Thomas: Wow. Wow. Cool. Yeah.

0:18:45 Lindsey: Um, so anyway, right, so in order to sort of justify this claim about prevalence, um, they do cite a couple of things, uh, from like the news and stuff. I

0:18:55 Thomas: It'll be like that one guy who punched a KKK member or something.

0:18:59 Lindsey: Wish it was that good. Um, So, before I get, before I get to those examples, uh, so here are the the three sets of extreme political attitudes that they're going to look at in the current paper, right, to fill this gap in the literature of not looking at political extremism. So they assess political correctness liberalism, that's one facet, political correctness authoritarianism, it's another one, and white identitarianism. And so here's some definitions here. So, they say, quote, "We define political correctness as a set of related attitudes characterized by the desire to avoid offense and avoid disadvantaging certain groups in society." And we're going to come back to the scales that they use to measure that. But like, even in the sort of abstract way, like, does that sound like a particularly extreme political attitude to you?

0:19:02 Thomas: Yeah.

0:19:45 Thomas: Not really.

0:19:47 Lindsey: No. Right. To avoid offense and avoid disadvantaging certain groups of society.

0:19:50 Thomas: Yeah, that is in a different era. That would be called like etiquette. You know, that would be like, oh, when you're out to tea with the baroness, you know, like that's always we try to not offend people throughout history.

0:19:56 Lindsey: Yeah, right. Yeah.

0:20:07 Lindsey: Right? Yeah. It's important to me to not be a dick. I don't think that makes me an extremist, personally. But whatever. Okay, they go on to say, quote, quote, a core aspect of PC authoritarianism is the belief that aggression and force are appropriate methods to achieve ideological goals. Okay.

0:20:12 Thomas: Yeah.

0:20:23 Thomas: Okay. Fair enough.

0:20:25 Lindsey: And so put a pin in that, as Andrew would say, because we'll see if aggression or violence.

0:20:29 Thomas: I'm sorry. I'm going to need you. You just violated the patent of opening arguments. I'm gonna need you to use something other than a pin. You're gonna have to invent your own thing. It'll be yours. Maybe the listeners can help you with it.

0:20:34 Lindsey: Oh, no.

0:20:43 Thomas: Put a wood. Maybe it could be something wooden that Chris can make, that your husband can make.

0:20:42 Lindsey: Okay, yeah, we should do a poll. Oh, put, put an artisanal. Yeah,

0:20:50 Thomas: A lynch pin.

0:20:50 Lindsey: Pop filter in it. I

0:20:51 Thomas: I don't know. Yeah.

0:20:51 Lindsey: Don't know. Oh. Oh, that'd be good. All right. But just wait and see how they measure it. Because, you know, if this is their claim about what PC authoritarianism is, they should actually measure that, right? Do they? Time will tell. All Right. Moving on.

0:21:02 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Put a clamp on that for later.

0:21:08 Lindsey: Put a clamp on that. I love it. That's woodworking thing. Chris has a lot of clamps. Okay, so they go on to say, quote, "White identitarianism is defined here as a set of political attitudes characterized by strong feelings of white identity solidarity and a belief in white victimization," so fine, uh, based on that description, white identitarianism feels like maybe a little bit euphemistic to me. There's some other terms that maybe could describe. No,

0:21:13 Thomas: Yep. Yeah, yeah. Oh. Really? Oh. I mean, I'm okay, I mean, I was gonna go with that as a, you know, like if we're all assuming that's an awful, probably, key measure of metric of racism, but are you saying they're trying to let it pass as something lighter than that, or what?

0:21:49 Lindsey: Pun intended, but it does feel like whitewashing it a little bit. Like, I, I think you could, and we'll get to their measure again, but like, it sounds like white supremacy is what they're measuring here, um, that's

0:21:51 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. It does, I guess I was just giving them the benefit of the doubt that that's what they were doing and they knew that, but Okay, but are we hold on.

0:22:03 Lindsey: An entirely fair. Yeah, we should always Yeah.

0:22:05 Thomas: Are we, are we setting that across from, "I would rather not offend people," like, is that, are these the two extremes? Well, on one hand, you get the, like, I'd rather be polite and not, like, be really awful to somebody in a, in a PC sort of way, like, I don't want to say bad things in front of people who, you know, might be marginalized in in some way.

0:22:10 Lindsey: Yeah.

0:22:19 Lindsey: Pretty extreme Yeah.

0:22:24 Thomas: Yeah, super extreme on the other end of that, uh, white genocide, is that what they're setting up here? Oh, my god, okay, wow. And

0:22:25 Lindsey: Uh, Yep, yeah. So yeah, so keep that in mind, those are their three extreme political positions and they keep referring to them that way. These are, so here's another quote. Quote, "These three extreme attitudes have attracted growing media coverage based largely on their increasing presence," again, there's a prevalence claim that they don't support, "continuing and their role in highly publicized violent incidents such as the Charlottesville rally," right? Fair. "Charlotte's rally, as well as several university campus protests regarding free speech," so right?

0:23:08 Thomas: That's the same as "Jews will not replace us," I'm apparently to believe, yeah.

0:23:14 Lindsey: So just to emphasize, they're, they're into, they're using these stories to support the the idea that extremism on both sides is linked with violence, and on, yeah, on one side they got the Charlottesville white supremacist rally, and on the other side, do you want to guess which, uh, news story they linked to to support the the campus free speech stuff? It's one that you covered, uh,

0:23:27 Thomas: Oh, Oh, it's one of the Evergreen? Okay. Uh, I think that's when Evergreen was, wasn't it?

0:23:36 Lindsey: It's not Evergreen, so I'll give you a hint, it was 2017, and there's a lot happening then, but was it

0:23:45 Thomas: I don't know. Maybe that was 2018. I can't remember.

0:23:45 Lindsey: Okay, it might have been there. Were a lot of protests that year. Berkeley, yeah, yep.

0:23:49 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, that's why I'm having a hard time. I mean, there's the Berkeley ones. Is Berkeley? Okay.

0:23:55 Lindsey: It's Berkeley, so they, yeah, so they link to a news article covering the Berkeley protests of Ben Shapiro, specifically. Right? So this wasn't even the Milo ones, where Antifa came and said, I don't know, people, you covered it, people should go back and listen to that episode, um, but yeah, so, so they linked to this article, and in the third paragraph of this article appears the following quote. Quote, "For the most part, it was an orderly event attended by respectful, orderly people," UC police police chief Margo Bennett said. "The crowd in the street was loud but not violent," again, this is their evidence, this is what they are presenting to show that, you know, the left wing are violent, violent Extremists.

0:24:01 Thomas: Yeah? Yeah. Yep.

0:24:25 Thomas: This is the other extreme, folks.

0:24:32 Lindsey: Yeah. Yep, pretty cool. So these high-profile rallies and protests are one piece of evidence they marshal for the idea that these violent political extremists on both sides are becoming more prevalent. They also, yeah, in an orderly and non-violent way, yeah.

0:24:36 Thomas: Yep, yeah. The extreme left is coming to take your children and ask that universities not platform horrible racists nicely ask nicely yeah in order oh

0:24:55 Lindsey: So that's one way that they justify their prevalence claim. Another way they do this is by contrasting the number of search results that you obtain for the the term "social justice warrior" as of February 2020, compared to the number of hits that you get if you constrain your search results from the year 2000 to 2010, so as of was

0:25:05 Thomas: For the, my god, you mean, so like after the term came into existence and was, yeah.

0:25:20 Lindsey: Invented, yeah. Yeah, so they're like, look, you know, this is the search term, just exploded, that, that obviously is evidence, evidence that left-wing extremism is on the rise,

0:25:29 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, try Yeah, this is an absolute nothing of evidence to me. Now, I'm not the scientist, Lindsay, but is this a total nothing bullshit of evidence to look at? What would that even prove? The people who search social justice warrior, what if that's entirely people on the right who are like, I hate these social justice warriors, you know?

0:25:37 Lindsey: That seems pretty thin, right? I don't know. It is. To be clear, though, they're talking about how many search results you come up with for those time ranges, right, but like, who is mentioning social justice warriors? Who's coming up in those searches?

0:25:51 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. You don't know. No way to know, yeah.

0:26:04 Lindsey: There's no way to know, but I know who I hear using that term more often and it's not left-wing extremists.

0:26:08 Thomas: Yeah. What I was gonna say, do you think the left is like, I'm gonna google myself, social justice war, no, it's more like all the people, you know, all the reactionaries who went, you know, nuts over this whole thing are like, this, they're gonna, they're going to hear the term like, yeah, who are these social justice wars on, I don't know, Bill Maher or some crap, and then they're going to search it.

0:26:09 Lindsey: Exactly So I just want to be clear, it's like, it's not, this is not like the number of searches during those times, it's the number of things that come up when you search for that term.

0:26:40 Thomas: I assumed they were doing the Google Trends, which is, this is the number of searches. I think that's still pretty equally nothing because that's just all the number of people who have written an article that's like these social justice warriors. And that just comes up in your results. Yeah.

0:26:44 Lindsey: Oh, yeah precisely yeah If anything, like, yeah, this doesn't seem like interpretable data to me in the way that they're trying to do it. But if it's anything it's probably evidence of like, oh, this is when we got the right-wing moral panic about social justice warriors.

0:26:58 Thomas: Yeah, yeah. I was just going to say it's a moral panic evidence thing like that's useful for that. Hey, when did people start going nuts about social justice? Well, OK, let's check when the results start taking off for that term. That's all that proves. Literally, that's it. That'S it.

0:27:03 Lindsey: Mm-hmm. Yeah yeah yeah If, if anything, that's it, yeah, yeah. So they continue, quote, given the extrem nature of these political attitudes and their possible role in aggressive protest behaviors, which they've provided no evidence of, we explore their association with the dark triad, personality traits, and trait entitlement, which we also talked about last week, right? And so they cite two studies that have looked at the relationship between dark triad traits and political extremism. And primarily, by the way, these studies seem to show that dark triads traits tend to be higher among right wing people, people, but the current authors are critical of these studies because of the way that they operationalize political extremism.

Right, so one, one common way to measure political ideology is to have like a 10 point scale, and one is like extremely left and 10 is extremely right, and then you just have people select the number that best sort of situates them on that spectrum. And so that, that is a very gross measure of political ideology, right? And and they say, you know, you, you, you actually need a more granular way to measure extreme political beliefs, right? And so they say they're adding to this literature by doing exactly this, by assessing specific extreme political views. And I don't mind that.

0:27:33 Thomas: Right. Okay. Yeah,

0:28:30 Lindsey: I mean, that was actually a lot of what we talked about last week, is that if you take a gross measure of narcissism and you look at generational differences, you get a different picture than if you break it out by facets. So that's fine.

0:28:30 Thomas: Sure. Yeah. Well, plus, and with these extreme views, I could see there being, and again, it's kind kind of a devil's advocate thing. I get it. But like, there may be people on the right and maybe the left who would say like, I'm as left as they come, you know, or I'm his right as they come. And then so you ask how far left, how far right. And they're like, well, I am a 10 because, you now, God's, God, guns, whatever, conservative and then like, but maybe, you know, that's not entirely accurate. You know, maybe that person isn't the one who's marching on the Capitol or saying Jews will not replace us. And you would want something more granular that's going to say, okay, let's measure this more precisely where you might be. Okay. Fair enough.

0:29:18 Lindsey: Absolutely, right? So I'm fully behind that. Again, that's why my husband and I are interested in maybe be actually doing the study instead of not doing it, yeah, yeah, so, so this is a perfectly reasonable research question. However, if I were to do the study, and maybe I will, what I would do is I would include the more traditional measures of political ideology. I would, I would replicate that piece of it, and then I would also include my better measures, my more granular measures, And yeah, for comparisons, right? You can look at how they relate to each other. You can, you can sort of like replicate the past relationship and then show how your measure is explaining something about it.

0:29:25 Thomas: Let's do it.

0:29:44 Thomas: Comparisons.

0:29:55 Thomas: Yeah.

0:29:55 Lindsey: That's not at all what they did. They didn't, it's literally, right, a very common way to measure political ideology is just to include that one item, right. Have people place themselves on that left-right continuum. They didn't even include that.

0:29:57 Thomas: Oh man.

0:30:10 Thomas: How hard would that have been? That's pretty easy. Yeah, how

0:30:12 Lindsey: Not hard, not hard at all, right? And also, there's tons of other measures that would have been relevant to validate the measures that they do include, and we'll get to that issue momentarily, but they don't do any of that. Instead, all they do is use these new measures, these unvalidated measures, and then make just, they just assert that they're measuring what they say they're measured. So, so anyway, so the sparse studies that have examined whether the dark triad is associated with political extremism seem to indicate, again, that actually they're more associated with right-wing views, but this could be the result of a measurement issue, and so they're going to use some better measures, and they're going to add to this literature. So here are their hypotheses. Hypotheses one and two are that higher scores on the dark-triad traits and on narcissistic entitlement will predict higher scores on white identitarianism and political correctness authoritarianism. I'm going to go ahead and tell you that those two hypotheses were partially supported.

0:31:07 Lindsey: So controlling for demographics and whatnot, they found that white identarianism was positively associated with Machiavellianism, which is that calculating manipulativeness, and with entitlement. So they did find that association and they also found a positive association with entitlement, okay. And then the the claim about PC authoritarianism also partially supported, so controlling for the same demographics, they found that people that were higher on PC authoritarianism were also higher on psychopathy and on entitlement. So, different facet of the dark triad, but they were both associated with entitlement. And then their third and final hypothesis was that the dark triad traits and narcissistic entitlement would predict lower scores on political correctness liberalism.

So that's their third extreme political view, right? And they've been spending their whole introduction saying that it's, you know, it's the extremism. That's what's problematic. And people are extreme, like they're, you know, violence and blah. So here's what they say, because this hypothesis comes out of nowhere. I was not expecting this based on their introduction. So they say, quote, "PC liberalism, although an extreme political attitude, is not characterized by aggression, intimidation, but rather by beliefs in the importance of emotional welfare." And so I'm like, oh, OK,

0:31:26 Thomas: Huh. Okay. Cool.

0:32:24 Lindsey: So it's not actually the case that the content of the views doesn't matter and it's just about extremism. OK, fine. Great. And this, this hypothesis was also partially supported. So, again, controlling for the same demographics, psychopathy negatively related to PC liberalism, so people lower on psychopathy had higher PC liberalism scores. Yeah. And that's consistent with some past research that we'll talk about showing that this, this measure, PC liberalism, is positively correlated with things like compassion, right?

0:32:43 Thomas: Yeah.

0:32:54 Thomas: Well, okay. I was gonna say this, I mean, I'm not sure about that second result you talked about, if this will contradict me, but it seems like the ability or the drive to try to, you know, essentially be more polite, essentially be more considerate of what, of your language, of updating your language, learning more about cultural change and all that, that strikes me as something that it would be hard to reconcile with narcissism or psychopathy, like just in general. It feels like that would be tough. But I suppose I could imagine like a few examples of, you know, if someone was already in those beliefs for some, don't know, had had those political beliefs, then maybe like psychopathy measures or narcissism measures or whatever would lead them to be like super extreme about them, I guess. But it doesn't seem like that would correlate much.

0:33:48 Lindsey: I mean, so the claim, the claim that they make, the way that they interpret it is like, um, that if somebody is, it's similar what you're saying, right? So they're saying that like if somebody has high on these traits like psychopathy, um, and they also hold these views, then what you're going to get is like a really problematic way of trying to implement or enforce your values or something like that, yeah.

0:34:08 Thomas: OK, but is that so? That's not the same as like if we take the subset of people who are just high on these views, on these dark triad thingies, what percentage of them are far right versus far left, or whatever, left versus right, okay. I

0:34:23 Lindsey: That That's exactly right, that's that's a prevalence claim that they do not test, and and again, if people should read the Quillette article, because the inferences that they're making in the Quillett article sound much more similar to that position than the one that's actually tested in this study.

0:34:36 Thomas: Am shocked I'm shocked at the low quality of journalism, uh, I would just like to say that, as I've had this Quillette article up on my computer with a ad blocker, I'm up to 4624 blocks on my ad blockers for this one page. Make of that what you will, that's a lot of ads.

0:34:36 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah.

0:34:54 Lindsey: It was tough to read because I don't have an ad blocker, and so the the text was constantly shifting as new ads were popping up, it was very annoying. Okay, all right. So, so we've already got the results, now let's, let's talk about the methods, let's start about what they did. All right, so they recruited 511 U.S. residents, roughly half men, half women, and they collected what's known as a stratified sample with regard to to key demographic variables.

So when you, when you collect a stratified sample, what you're doing is you're trying to get a sample that matches the proportions of the population on some dimension. So if you're stratifying based on age, which is one of the dimensions they, they did stratify on, then like if you've got 20 boomers in your population, you'd want to get 20 boomers in your sample, right? Things like that. So they stratified based on the age, gender, ethnicity, and employment status, and so their sample should, should reflect the the characteristics of the U.S. on those dimensions, which is, it's important, right? Like stratifying your sample on questions like this, I think makes sense.

Especially if they'd actually presented any prevalence data, it would have been especially important, but they didn't. Okay. And so let's talk about their measures, right? So let's start with psychological entitlement, because we already talked about that last week. So that's that facet of narcissism involving the feeling that you deserve more than other people, right. Right? And so the example items I gave last week, same scale, they use the same scale that I talked about last time, the psychological entitlement scale. So the example atoms were, I honestly feel I'm just more deserving than others. And if I were on the Titanic, I would deserve to be on the first lifeboat.

0:34:58 Thomas: Okay. Yeah.

0:36:29 Thomas: That's got to be my favorite one. It

0:36:32 Lindsey: It was good, right? I don't know if I said last time but that item ends in an exclamation point, which I think is nice.

0:36:39 Thomas: Makes it even better, yeah. You want to separate out the like, maybe I should be on the first lifeboat people, you know, like slightly less narcissistic.

0:36:40 Lindsey: Yeah, it's the best. Yeah, yeah. No, you want the people that are enthusiastic about their deservingness to be on the first lifeboat. Yeah so, they administered that. And then so, this dark triad. So again, the subscales on this measure are Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy. So Machiavellianism again, it characterizes or it's characterized by like the cynicism and self-interestedness as well as like high levels of this kind of methodical calculating manipulativeness. So a few example items from this subscale are most people can be manipulated.

0:37:23 Thomas: Anyway, I'd like, the amazing Randi would be, would say that. Does that make him a bad guy?

0:37:29 Lindsey: Because I bet that he would not. Well, I didn't know him. But I'm betting that he wouldn't score highly even if he endorsed that item. He wouldn't square highly on some of these other ones. So for example, it's wise to keep track of information that you can use against others later, yeah, one more, uh, whatever it takes, you must get the important people on your side, so you see there's like this sort of like strategic self-interested element, um, to this construct that's a little what

0:37:37 Thomas: Okay. Yeah, I mean, what are we talking about in that case? Am I a diplomat in the UN, or am I just me, because yeah, I mean, if I'm answering that, I've always tried, I always think of like, if I're trying to answer one of these questionnaires or whatever, I'm always like, am I just talking about now, who's the important people now, I don't even understand it, but, or am I in the member of the UN that I'm like, well, yeah, I need this, I need the buy-in of the important people, like I definitely would need that depending on my job, I don't know, yeah.

0:38:01 Lindsey: Do you mean, well I Mean, as, as with a lot of these traits, it's, it's really, it's, uh, the aggregate score here that matters right, like we but

0:38:30 Thomas: I'm just saying my goal, not my goal, but my reality is that my results should be thrown out every single time I have to ever take one of these. Like, what do you mean? What situation am I? Yeah, I don't know. Am I presenting a major change in my workplace? Like, yeah, then I need the important people on my side on that. I don't know. Like I can't

0:38:51 Lindsey: Is this like an approach you take to life, right? At least when I'm filling these out, that's what I'm thinking. Like, does this?

0:38:56 Thomas: Make sense of that. And that's what I'm trying to tell you. I mean, sometimes in life I could see doing that. Or if I'm just sitting here on on my couch playing video games, I have no idea what that question even means, you know, okay.

0:39:09 Lindsey: No, I hear you. I mean, but maybe that's because you're not very high on the trait. I don't know. It's because I have,

0:39:13 Thomas: I'm probably that asshole that sees the ink blot thingies, you know, and instead of saying like that's my dad not liking me very much, I'm like, that's just some ink that somebody sprayed on the page, I don't know what to tell you, yeah.

0:39:27 Lindsey: No, but I like I've known people that I think probably would score highly on the sub dimension. And they think about a lot of their interpersonal interactions in terms of how they can turn them to their advantage, right, everything, everything about their interactions is strategic and manipulative, it's, you know, and if you see the whole scale and context I think you, you would get a sense that that's really what's coming out with this with this dimension

0:39:38 Thomas: Yeah. That makes sense sure Yeah. No I know I'm Not, I'm not, you know, I'm not bashing the test, I just, that's, I never understand these quite, like, there's a lot of these where I'm like, I don't know how to think about this. Like, I don't even know how give an answer because it just depends on what situation I'm in, you know?

0:39:51 Lindsey: Yeah

0:40:05 Thomas: Yeah. So

0:40:04 Lindsey: Right, it's a good point. It does because the questions like this that are easiest to answer are the things that are very consistent about you across situations right um and so if if you really do approach all situations like this then you'd easily be like oh yeah I'm a seven you know

0:40:11 Thomas: Okay. Yeah. Oh, then I wouldn't even think about it. Yeah, okay. Definitely. Yeah okay. Gotcha. Sorry.

0:40:18 Lindsey: Yeah yeah but, I'm with you a lot of these personality things are hard to measure for exactly that reason because our personality does, or things about how we behave and feel, change across situations. So, and on things like, I don't know about you, but like on things like that, I usually end up selecting a middle value and That's where most people end up on most personality traits because it does depend.

0:40:22 Thomas: I always, yeah.

0:40:34 Thomas: Yeah. Okay.

0:40:38 Lindsey: And that's meaningful, you know, but um, So that's Machiavellianism. And then we've got, uh, narcissism, and we talked about this last week so I won't spend too much time, but um, this describes, you know, someone With a Grandiose

0:40:50 Thomas: It's Just one. To Ten, are you like Trump? Okay, we can move on, huh?

0:40:53 Lindsey: Yeah, that's that's good, concise description, yeah. Um, but it describes someone with a very grandiose sense of self, god-like qualities, um, an extreme sense of entitlement, in this sort of of like performative status seeking kind of, kind of motivation. And so in this particular scale, this included items like, "I know that I'm special because everyone keeps telling me so," and "I insist on getting the respect that I deserve." Okay. And then the last, the last of the dark triad traits is psychopathy. And, so this is characterized by low levels of, like, as a concept, it's characterized by lower levels of empathy and remorse and high levels of impulsivity. There's an antisocial behavior component to it, so like doing things that are illegal and risk-taking stuff. This particular scale doesn't capture all of those elements, but it includes things like, "I'll say anything to get what I want," and "I like to take revenge on authorities."

0:41:47 Lindsey: And those kinds of traits do tend to be central in psychopathy. So both the dark triad scale and the psychological entitlement scale are both very well-validated, well-researched scales. These are fine ways to measure these constructs that they're trying to measure. No complaints here. But now we get to the really fun scales. So they've got these two...

0:42:06 Thomas: Some blues scales, all right, never mind, Dorian.

0:42:09 Lindsey: Oh, Yeah, so they've got these two different scales of political correctness, which they call political correctness liberalism, and political correctness authoritarianism. Both of these scales were first presented in a master's thesis, an unpublished master's thesis. They have not been validated in any way. I'll talk in specifics about what I mean by that. But they have not be validated, and they are psychometrically a mess. They are an absolute mess, right? The third measure that's central to their study is this white identitarianism measure. These authors of the current paper created the scale and they have not validated it, or they have not even attempted to validate that it's measuring the thing. It looks a little bit better than the two PC scales, and, like, I believe that it is probably measuring what they say it is, but again, you can't just assume that, you have to demonstrate it, and they had not even tried to do that.

0:43:09 Thomas: So they just invented their own scale to make a point, not even validated it. It's unsupported. So you could say, I mean, that gives you a lot of freedom in what you're able to say in your study if you're allowed to invent a scale, not validate it, and then just draw the conclusions you want from it.

0:43:10 Lindsey: Uh-huh. Yep. Yep. Right.

0:43:29 Lindsey: And, and that, the, the biggest, the, the place that that is the biggest problem is the PC scales, by far, right? Because we'll talk about the items on these scales, but they do not appear to measure at all what they are claimed to measure. So, yeah, so they've got these, they've got these three scales, they're not validated, they, they mention in their discussion section, they're like, oh, yeah, this is a limitation, future research should actually try to validate these scales. I'm like, no, that's a pass direction, you do that first and then you make these sweeping claims based on your results. Um, it's, a mess, okay.

0:43:35 Thomas: Okay. I So Lindsay, as a science person though, like how, I mean how normal is this? I guess as a lay person, I don't know. Is this something that you can get away with? You can kind of make up a scale as you go along and maybe that still proves something or Or is this, what level of like malpractice is this in your experience?

0:44:16 Lindsey: Think this is pretty bad. And I mean, I won't say that it never happens. There have been criticisms of, you know, some areas in psychology, social psychology gets heat for this sometimes that they're making up measures and they're not sufficiently validating them. And I think that's fair. But what I do not see that what I thought was genuinely atrocious here was that there was no attempt to validate them. Like again, they didn't provide provide a measure of political ideology. They're making claims about these being extreme manifestations of political ideology. Didn't measure it. They're making a claim that this political correctness authoritarianism measure is a measure of authoritarianism that appears on the left. There are validated, well-researched measures of left-wing authoritarianism. They could put that into their study to show that like, hey, we're getting like overlap here and there's these distinctions. This

0:44:17 Thomas: Ooh, wow. Yeah. Well,

0:45:05 Lindsey: White, white identitarianism

0:45:06 Thomas: Let's think back to, is this appropriate? Think back to the narcissism episode where you said, okay, we had this historical data. And so in order to, and, and you know, you can't change historical data, you can't go back and ask people from the twenties or whatever, like new questions. So what you do is you take a new group of people, ask them those same questions, then also ask them the newer, like accepted better questions, or I guess in this instance, like maybe your new proposed scale that you want to use on a given thing. And then you compare them and see like, okay, how well do these match up?

0:45:24 Lindsey: Yes. Yes. No, that's, that's exactly right. I mean, and that was, a that was a strength of that paper that we talked about, because when I read their q sort measure of narcissism, I was worried about it, I was like, I mean, there's some face validity, meaning that it, these, these questions appear to measure facets of narcissism, but they really need to demonstrate that, and they were, and then they were like, oh, yeah, and we ran this pilot thing where we demonstrated that it's, it's a valid measure of narcissism.

0:46:02 Thomas: It's pretty egregious that they didn't even include that one to 10 scale, as you said earlier, like that would be, have been not a lot of ink.

0:46:03 Lindsey: No. No. Exactly, and, like, so, and on the white identitarianism one, um, they take pains to note that, like, yeah, so what we're measuring here is separate from past constructs that have been measured about white, white identity, and it's different from these other things. Well, you need to demonstrate that too, right? There are measures of white identity, there are measures of, uh, you know, various shades of racism that would overlap with this. And they need to do the work of showing that their scale relates to these other constructs in the ways that they say that it should, right? So establishing scale validity in its best form, it's a very laborious process. There's a ton of work that goes into it. The fact that they didn't even attempt to do any level of that before publishing this paper, I do think is pretty atrocious.

0:46:26 Thomas: Mm hmm.

0:46:55 Thomas: Wow. So it's not as though, you know, this is a valid. So far, I mean, we have a lot to go through, but so far it sounds like this is a garbage study and a garbage article about a garbage study. So like a double garbage, it seems like.

0:47:01 Lindsey: Oh, yeah. It's double Trash. Yeah. Yeah, oh, and by the way, this is not published in a psych journal, I should say that, if people are wondering how it got published

0:47:15 Thomas: Oh, was it published in a pay to play? But

0:47:18 Lindsey: It's not that bad, so I I've never heard of this uh journal before, it's called Hellion or something, um, it's multi-disciplinary scientific journal, and there's nothing necessarily wrong with that, but the fact I

0:47:30 Thomas: It didn't pass peer review for psychology in any major way

0:47:34 Lindsey: Would be surprised if this was the first outlet they sent this paper to, yeah, yeah like there are psych journals that are devoted to personality research like this and uh it

0:47:39 Thomas: But I thought Quillette was all about the science, and liberals deny the science, and then they're therefore, yeah, Quillett has to tell you that, no, here's the real sign, oh no, they actually have to publish and and write about studies that probably could not make it in a real journal, sorry, that's probably too far, but it sounds like this other journal is at least real, you're saying, it's just maybe not, it wouldn't be the target if it wouldn't have been published there, if this was a good study, like a, like a major good study, sounds like,

0:47:55 Lindsey: Sounds that way yeah yeah That's, that is my guess, right, if this, if uh, like I'm guessing they, they probably sent it to places like Journal of Research and Personality, like this, those would be some of the first, or, you know, Personality Individual Differences, those would mean some of those first places that would come to my mind if I did a study like this. And the fact that they went with this sort of non-specialized journal, again, I don't know anything about this journal, so I don't want to impugn its character or whatever, but it seems to be kind of low to mid-range, and it's possible that they just don't have access to enough truly expert reviewers to catch everything that's wrong here, yeah

0:48:48 Thomas: Oh boy, well, Lindsey, here's the thing, this article and study seems so bad that we're not even close to done debunking it, I think we're gonna have to do a part two too. And unanticipated part two, everybody. There's just so much. And I slowed Lindsay down. I want you to direct all hate mail toward me and not toward Lindsay. I slowed you down a bit, but I think it'll be worth it for the for the long, slow burn of how bad this study is and and how how awful the the Quillette article is.

0:48:48 Lindsey: Nope Nope we got a long way to go yeah yep yeah

0:49:19 Thomas: But I think we're going to have to pause there.

0:49:21 Lindsey: It's, it'll be worth it, though

0:49:23 Thomas: Yeah. Hey, tell you what? We don't do this enough, why don't we make part two available way early for patrons, so I feel like we don't do enough for our patrons, let's make part 2 available early for Patreons, patreon.com/seriouspod, you want to hear part 2 sooner, go pledge, everybody else, you know, sorry you'll have to wait, but uh, we we don't do that enough, it'll be a little perk I hate Quillette, hate him so much, no all right, well, I I guess we'll have to pause it there. We're going to find out even more. On a scale of, I don't know what, a new scale I just invented, Lindsay, but didn't vet in any way.

0:49:35 Lindsey: Yeah I have a lot of respect for him now. I

0:50:01 Thomas: How much bad science was in part one versus how much we're to hear in part two?

0:50:06 Lindsey: Mean, we've already heard some bad stuff, right? But no, the bulk of the stuff that I was yelling about yesterday is yet to come. Yeah. Yeah, thank you.

0:50:09 Thomas: Yep. Oh, well, I can't wait. We'll see everybody for part two. Thanks as always, Lindsay. Can't wait for the part two breakdown. We'll See Everybody Then.

0:50:31 Clip: Thank you so much for listening to Serious Inquiries Only. If you like the show, the absolute best thing you can do is support us at patreon.com/seriouspod. The second best thing you can do, is please share it on social media or by word of mouth. Speaking of social media, follow me on Twitter at Serious Pod. If would like to be Facebook friends, send me a request at facebook.com Thomas podcast. If not up for that level of intimacy, that's fine. Maybe you want to join the discussion at facebook.com/groups/SIO members. Thank you again for listening. We'll see you next time.