Lee Jussim, a Rutgers University professor with expertise in stereotypes and prejudice, argues that stereotypes often reflect real group differences—like Black Americans’ higher crime involvement or political polarization—contrasting this with DEI critiques. His 2022 critique of DEI rhetoric sparked a backlash, including a petition demanding retractions from nearly 1,400 academics. Research in the late 2010s and early 2020s identified left-wing authoritarianism, mirroring right-wing patterns but overlooked for decades. Jussim warns that academic incentives distort findings, favoring sensationalism over nuanced truth, exposing systemic intellectual biases. [Automatically generated summary]
Hey everyone, it's Andrew Clavin with this week's interview with the remarkable social psychologist Lee Jessam, who has done some incredible, let's say politically incorrect, would be the polite way to say it, studies.
In other words, true studies.
You know, I talk a lot on my podcast about the mad scene in Hamlet because I think it's Shakespeare's prediction of what is going to happen to human thought after the Reformation.
And one of the things that happens in Hamlet, Hamlet, we don't know whether he's sane and pretending to be mad or mad and pretending to be mad, but he basically starts to say that everything is perception, that if his mood changes, the entire world becomes different.
If he's depressed, it becomes ugly, even though it's beautiful.
He says words are detached from meaning when he's asked what he's reading.
He says words, words, words.
And he says morality is a matter of opinion.
He says nothing's either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
And I think one of Shakespeare's points is that people who hold these ideas are not just insane, but they know that they're being insane.
They're pretending to be insane because nobody actually believes any of these things at all.
And so this is, we now live in a world, I mean, because Shakespeare was right about everything, we now live in a world in which people tell us that none of our perceptions are reliable.
They are being manipulated for the power of the powerful.
They are because we're racist, because we're sexist.
We don't even know what gender we are.
And a lot of Jussum's work has kind of changed that.
He's chaired three departments at Rutgers: criminal justice, psychology, and anthropology.
His research includes studying stereotypes, prejudice, discrimination, and political radicalization.
Lee, thank you so much for coming on.
So the first thing I have to ask you, and just because I'm curious about this, you're in the university.
You're doing stuff that goes totally against the basic dictum of our society, dicta of our society.
Do you get in trouble?
I mean, do you have a hard time?
Or is Rutgers just a great place?
Well, so I have not gotten in trouble at Rutgers.
Rutgers is pretty good.
You know, it's a state university, which is no guarantee of anything, but it's a state university where it seems like there's a history of the administrators understanding that they are legally constrained from interfering with faculty or student speech, right?
I mean, the First Amendment prohibits the government, and as a state university, any administrator, really, including me, and the faculty too, we are employees of the state and we can't be in the business of censoring anybody.
Some state universities don't realize that and then they do.
And then, you know, all sorts of hell can break loose, people can even be fired.
But Rutgers doesn't have that history.
There's no, you know, I don't know if the environment is good, right?
Because I mean, the faculty at Rutgers are just as far left as anywhere else.
And that creates other dysfunctions, but I have been, people have come after me in my job, not so much from Rutgers, but from other places.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, this has happened several times, but probably the biggest and most intense one was when in one of the major journals in psychology,
Perspectives on Psychological Science, a European psychologist wrote an article that sort of did double duty.
Was a critique of a prior published piece in the same journal that had advocated for all sorts of diversity-based interventions.
And the critique was like, this is a bad article.
And on top of that, it's a bad idea.
So it was sort of double-headed.
It was a bad article, but it wasn't just that it was a bad article.
It was like the entire set of things that it was arguing for were bad.
So then the editor of the journal invited several people, including me, to comment on the critique.
And the critique was really good.
I added some of my own commentary.
Actually, and this is, okay, so that was also true that there was me and two other critiquers, two other commentary terms, all of whom endorsed the critique and added elements of their own because the rhetoric and ideology and even around diversity and DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion is really just such propaganda.
It's easy to show that it's propaganda.
So we kind of did that.
And all hell broke loose.
Now, this was in late 2022.
Prior to that, as far as I know, almost every academic article that was just bluntly critical of DEI.
Like, you know, it's bad, we should get rid of it.
Not like, oh, well, you know, there's not enough DEI.
That's the problem with DEI.
No, no, no, I'm not talking about that.
I'm talking about the whole idea is bad.
Here's why, blah, blah, blah.
Every article that I know of that made those kinds of arguments evoked a mob, usually on social media.
Sometimes there were like online petitions with thousands of people calling to retract the article, and they were ultimately retracted, actually.
So that's what happened to this set of articles that endorsed and expanded on this critique of diversity.
There was an online mob that like all 1,400, almost 1,400 academics signed an online petition demanding that the editor be fired and the papers be retracted.
You know, one of them was mine.
So in some ways, I was the worst culprit.
The editor was, you know, it's hard to tell.
It was sort of a close call whether the editor was the most evil in the eyes of the mob or I was the most evil.
So the editor was evil for having invited these people, all of whom critiqued it.
And you could make a case that he probably should have invited someone who was likely to be more sympathetic and to vet the arguments.
I think that probably would have been better, actually.
I don't think it's a firing offense, given how much of an ideological monoculture Academy is.
Routinely, you get all papers in an issue saying that variations on the same thing, but okay, whatever.
But my sin was using a quote from Fiddler on the Roof.
Well, okay, so, right, and that this 2022, like it was before all the campus anti-Semitism really kind of exploded.
And well, so let me let me finish the story, but it was probably sort of advance notice of how bad it was going to get on campus.
Jews and Fiddler on the Roof00:09:12
Okay, so the quote I used was from the song tradition.
So the song, Fiddler on the Roof, for listeners who aren't familiar with it, is about Jews in the late 19th or early 20th century in Russia or Poland, or Russia was constantly conquering Poland.
So who knows where it was, and who were slowly emerging.
And, you know, these were rural farmers and, you know, but the world was changing.
Russia was gearing up for revolution and all that sort of stuff.
Okay, so that's the setup for the story.
And the song tradition is about how the community's traditions, their religious and cultural traditions keep them together even in difficult times.
But then there's an interlude where somebody steps in and says, in the middle of the song, steps in and says, yeah, but there was the time he sold him a horse, but delivered a mule.
Right, right, right.
Right.
Okay.
And I use that quote as a metaphor for progressive hypocrisy and disingenuousness around diversity.
Right.
So diversity has two meanings.
The first, probably most Americans would endorse most of the time, certainly intellectually.
It's just variety.
You know, it's just a generic variety.
So it could be any kind of variety.
And in fact, without getting all, you know, into all the weeds, when the Supreme Court legalized the use of race in admissions in the 70s and then again in the early 2000s, it was only as a subset of diversity writ large.
It was not a green light to only use race.
It was like as part of like lots of other things, you know, specifically, if I remember in the decision, it was like having traveled widely, having changed careers.
They were all, you know, university should be a place where there's diversity of ideas, which I, whether or not that justified use of race and admissions, I certainly agree with that part of the point, that diversity broadly is a valuable thing in universities.
Okay, so that's the first meaning, variety.
But the second meaning is a group the progressive left considers oppressed.
So there's a small number of groups.
It could be blacks, maybe Latinos, maybe Indigenous people.
You know, the list is constantly changing, probably trans people now, right?
So diversity can mean and is often used, you know, especially to refer to what, you know, what you and I growing up probably would have called minority groups.
Now in academia, they're called minoritized groups.
Okay.
All right.
Because language, right?
I mean, this is a feature of the left, this kind of like distorting, distorted use of language in order to advance a political agenda.
I want to stop you for a minute because I want to get to these studies.
You have said much more controversial things than this.
I mean, your studies basically, basically, your studies about stereotypes basically say the stereotypes are not that bad.
They're not this distorted.
Is that a fair summary?
Yes.
Yeah.
I mean, bad is a judgment.
You know, it's like a moral judgment or something like that.
But I mean, yeah, they're not that inaccurate.
Yeah.
I mean, I mean, there are exceptions.
It's not like, okay, let's back up a little bit.
Let me start with some qualifications.
Okay.
It's not true that everything everyone believes about groups is true.
That's like ridiculous.
And one can't and should not assume, absent, you know, some sort of very strong familiarity with data, whether it's, you know, national surveys or census data, that one's particular beliefs about groups are true.
That's a caveat.
And also, some beliefs about groups don't have a truth standard.
You know, you can't evaluate whether they're true or not.
But having said all that, there are now dozens of studies that have assessed the accuracy of stereotypes that people actually hold.
So we're not talking about propaganda in the news media.
We're not talking about people grandstanding on social media about this group is evil or that group is evil.
No, no, if you ask people like you and me what they think about particular groups could be men and women, blacks and whites, rich and poor.
Studies have been done of occupational stereotypes, of political stereotypes.
In general, with some exceptions, people's beliefs correspond, people's beliefs about groups correspond not perfectly, but reasonably well with what the groups are actually like.
Can you give me an example?
Oh, well, I can give a couple of examples.
So people are nicely in touch with the fact that Black Americans are both more likely to be perpetrators and victims of crime than are white Americans.
So people come very close to that.
An example where people, you know, it's more of a mixed bag is actually political stereotypes.
So by any reasonable measure, people will recognize that Democrats are more left, more liberal than Republicans.
Republicans are more conservative, but actually both groups tend to exaggerate the differences.
This is a quip.
It's not exactly true, literally true, but it captures this exaggeration phenomenon.
So Republicans think Democrats are communists and Democrats think Republicans are fascists.
That captures this exaggeration.
So is there any way in which, you know, in Othello, when Iago basically turns Othello into the person he wants him to be, is there any way in which our perceptions and the actual behaviors of people are interrelated?
So in other words, you know, you don't allow Jews to do anything but go into financial business and then you say, well, Jews are good with money.
Is there any way in which there's a causative relationship between prejudice?
Well, yeah, I mean, so historically, various groups' life courses were severely constrained by either laws or social norms.
I mean, that was certainly true for Jews in Europe.
This is one of the reasons why so many Jews went into finance, right?
Part of the, you know, Christians couldn't charge interest on loans.
So somebody needed to do it.
So, and Jews were prohibited from lots of other things.
So Jews went into finance.
It's kind of the short version of how that happened, but it's not restricted to Jews.
You know, like the Jim Crow South was really ugly and evil.
Yeah.
Opportunities for black people to do anything were few and far between.
And, you know, the one place where the local community had really succeeded with fine colors was Tulsa in the early part of the 20th century.
It was burnt down by actual white supremacists.
So, so, yeah, you know, and then women, you know, women were for centuries constrained and blocked from positions of power or intellectual leadership.
I mean, not 100% completely.
You have some rare exceptions, but they were rare exceptions.
In general, that was the case.
But, but in the, especially in the Democratic West, you know, in the last hundred years, the societies have been far more open.
So, so you don't, when you don't have that kind of heavy-handed constriction of people's opportunities, the answer to your question is still yes, but it's more subtle.
You know, right?
So if the laws aren't prohibiting women from, I don't know, voting or running for office, well, now they can, but actually, it's funny that you asked this because the very first topic that I studied starting as a graduate student and really early in my career at Rutgers was self-fulfilling prophecies.
And what self-fulfilling prophecy is, when I have an erroneous belief about you, or somebody else, one person has an erroneous belief about a second, and that you then treat, the first person treats the second person in accord with those expectations.
That evokes behavior that confirms the expectations.
Yeah, that is a fellow that's.
Yeah, so and that does the.
My field was in the business in this 70s and 80s, early into the 90s maybe, of making insane claims about the power of self-fulfilling prophecies, that people's lives were determined by them, and all this.
There's never any evidence for any of that.
Um, they were just wild exaggerations.
But underneath the exaggerations there's a real phenomenon.
It's small, modest people overcome it all the time, but there is absolutely there.
People tend to rise or fall to some degree not everyone all the time, but to some degree, in a manner consistent with other people's expectations.
That's actually absolutely true.
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Um.
So I have to move on for time to talk about this other study, because this study it made me laugh out loud that that you had, you had discovered, made the incredible discovery that there is such a thing as left-wing authoritarianism which, which nobody, nobody had admitted even existed.
Uh so, so how?
How did that come about?
How did you?
Okay so, first place I, it was not my discovery okay, although I I strongly, I mean I kind of You don't really know something without the, you know, until there's data.
But, but we, me, my lab, people, we knew this was true.
In fact, okay, but there were two teams in the late 2010s, one publishing in 2016 or 17, the other in early 2020, that developed separate scale questionnaires to measure left-wing authoritarianism.
And they both nailed it.
And now my lab uses those all the time.
Actually, one of the members of one of the teams is my former graduate student.
They actually invited me on the paper, but I was too busy and I couldn't work on it.
So I begged off.
So yes, I sort of, oh man, I missed that boat.
That would have been great to have been on that paper.
So, you know, what inspired those papers were, you know, people in the social sciences, people have been studying right-wing authoritarianism for, you know, since the 1950s.
Maybe even since it probably began in the 1930s and it really picked up steam in the 1950s.
And until these two labs, these two teams developed these questionnaires assessing left-wing authoritarianism starting not quite 10 years ago, like eight or nine years ago, until that happened, the social sciences, with some rare exceptions, were generally in denial about the existence of the left-wing of left-wing authoritarianism.
Wow, that's amazing.
One of the first paper, one of the team's first paper is called Finding the Loch Ness Monster.
And it's called Finding the Loch Ness Monster because an earlier paper had characterized left-wing authoritarianism as equivalent to the Loch Ness Monster.
That's amazing.
I mean, it's amazing because left-wingers want so much power centered in the government that it would have to be authoritarian almost by definition.
Is there any difference between left-wing authoritarianism and right-wing authoritarianism?
So that's a really, really sort of difficult and controversial that's scientifically controversial, not really political.
No one's being denounced for their answer to that.
So one team took a common measure of right-wing authoritarianism and simply reversed the items.
So I'm inventing this because I don't have the scale right in front of me.
But if on assessing right-wing authoritarianism, would have items like, we need a strong leader to ensure America sticks to its traditional values.
It would have something like that.
So a reversal would be something like, America needs a strong leader so we can overturn our traditional values.
So it's just a simple reversal.
So that says it's the same thing, but completely symmetrical.
But the second team did more preliminary assessment of the characteristics of the scale items that they put together.
And they found stuff similar, but not quite identical to right-wing authoritarianism.
So the structure there, this will not be surprising, but this doesn't appear on the right-wing authoritarianism scales, is one of the factors, one of the veins in this second left-wing authoritarianism scale is what they call top-down censorship.
So that's completely familiar.
If you know far-left extremists throughout the country, they're constantly, I mean, calling for our papers to be retracted is left-wing authoritarianism, right?
It's censorship, right?
So It's not that people right-wing authoritarians don't endorse censorship, but that just didn't emerge as a factor, as a strain in the questionnaire is developing it.
So, so, and then it gets complicated again because one of my current students believes there's a good chance that despite the differences between the two measures, there's an underlying similarity between the psychology, the underlying psychology of people who are left-wing and right-wing authoritarianism.
That was going to be my next question, actually.
Yeah, is there an authoritarian personality?
Well, you know, that's that was the 1950s work.
Was this the Adorno, who was a Marxist, led this, right?
Led this team assessing the authoritarian personality.
But what they meant by that was a right-wing authoritarianism.
And it's not completely ridiculous.
Well, it's not completely ridiculous, right?
I mean, World War II had just ended, and it's like, how the hell did that happen?
And, you know, and all that sort of stuff.
So, trying to understand that was not ridiculous.
Why?
You know, I was born in 1955.
I wasn't a social scientist of any time, even in graduate school around 1980.
But I would love to have been around in the 50s to ask, why are you not studying communism?
How is this possible?
Like, I think not that you shouldn't be studying right-wing authoritarianism.
You should be, we all should be, you know, those of us who study that, it's completely reasonable to study far-right authoritarianism.
It's reasonable to study fascism, but we're just going to like ignore communism and Marxism.
What the hell?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I have no idea.
I have no idea how that happened.
Yeah, it was kind of, it was kind of the strain in intellectuals.
So is there a way, you know, my son asked me this hilarious question once.
He said, if social scientists brought out a study that could be replicated and was peer-reviewed saying that men and women are exactly the same and have the exact same desires and attitudes and feelings, he said, what would your reaction be?
I said, I would ignore it because I know that's just not true, right?
You know, it's like you could bring out 10 studies, I would still ignore it.
And so I wonder, like, we're sort of being taught all the time that our perceptions of one another are not reliable.
And yet you seem to be saying that they are.
And I wonder, is there something in the way that studies are done that sets out to debunk our experiences as opposed to confirm them?
Or is there some way in which they're not being done fairly?
Yeah, well, so there's a name.
Yes, a very famous European psychologist, Gerd Gigerenzer, has coined a term, which is the bias bias, which is the bias on the part of academics favoring uncovering biases, right?
And that's incentivized because let's say you do some study and say, you know, people are really pretty reasonable.
They're pretty rational and kind of what they tell you is mostly true.
They get some things wrong here and there.
People could be motivated and, you know, whatever.
But basically, they're pretty good at navigating the world.
That's going to be treated as like, why should we publish this?
This is just not that interesting.
Like, I think that's actually really interesting.
But in the field, it's not going to be treated as very interesting.
And so there's this incentivization to uncover flaws and foibles and failures and biases and errors, which then incentivizes people to even characterize patterns that are reasonable, rational, and justified as error and bias, because it's easier to publish that stuff.
And right?
And we're all incentivized to publish because it's published a perish, right?
That's where we get grants, we get raises, we get promotions by virtue of mostly of publication.
So, so we're in we're incentivized to make up nonsense.
We are, which is not to say that everything we have is nonsense.
I don't think what I do is nonsense.
You know, and there are, you know, I mean, I've cited some social science.
I mean, this Giga-Rensor stuff is really good.
The left-wing authoritarianism stuff is really good.
There are social scientists who do really, really good work.
But, but, but by and large, there it's not a pretty picture.
Yeah, well, it is, but it's really interesting to me that that should be a strain in intellectual thought that intellectual thought is inherently untrustworthy.
Well, you know, I, you know, the thoughts of intellectuals are inherently, I mean, I would sign up for that.
I'm very with Thomas Sowell on that one.
His great book, Intellectuals in Society, and the failures of the intellectuals are just legion.
They are legion.
And so it is, it is enough, there's enough of a bad history, and I see enough of it in my own disciplines.
You know, these are people with PhDs and lots of publications and high GRE scores, and three nines and four O's of undergraduates saying ridiculous, stupid, obviously wrong things all the time.
Right.
You know, speaking of Thomas Sowell, you know, he has this wonderful book where he writes about the different kinds of prejudice.
So that if I meet a young, you know, I'm making up this example, but if I meet a young Arab guy at a party, it would be one thing for me to hate this guy or expect him to be a terrorist where I have time to sit and talk to him.
But if you're a TSA agent and you've got approximately 20 seconds to decide whether you should let this guy on the plane, maybe you should search him, you know, just because of the odds, you know.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, is it irrational to accuse police of racial profiling may be the best way to deal with a situation?
Yeah, you know, the profiling to me is a tough one.
Okay.
Because first, there's still lots of residential segregation.
So you mostly still have like largely black communities, largely white communities.
You do have some integrated communities.
And so, you know, in largely segregated communities, it doesn't really come up, right?
There's no, you know, now they're going to, the cops are going to know which communities have higher crime rates.
Right.
You know, there's going to be evidence.
And, you know, and it's not like, you know, a lot of I have colleagues, colleagues in criminal justice who would argue that crime statistics are biased in some way.
They may be to some degree.
But my understanding is even if you use the reported crimes by members in the local community, in general, the rates of black crime are higher than in other communities.
And so if the cops know that, it's reasonable for them to spend more time policing in those communities.
And contra the rhetoric, the defund the police rhetoric, survey after survey has shown that black Americans generally, I mean, there's diversity, not everybody thinks the same thing, but generally want as much or more police presence in their neighborhoods, although they also do support reforms of police departments so that are less aggressive, less violent, and all that sort of stuff.
Yeah.
I got to stop there.
Lee Jussim from Rutgers University, social psychologist.
Really interesting, interesting stuff.
I hope we get to talk again.
I really enjoyed it.
Thank you very much.
Thanks for coming on.
Bye.
I have to tell you, if he had only said that thing about a bias toward bias, that would have been just an actually profound revelation because I think that that was not always true of humankind.
We did not always think that our perceptions were, you know, should be judged to be untrue from the get-go.
Really interesting conversation with Lee Jussum from Rutgers University.
His work is important and it's quoted in many important places.
And I was glad to talk to him.
And I will be glad to be back on Friday with the Andrew Clavin Show.