Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
Appearances
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
And it takes like 10 minutes instead of two years. I'm going to bring this back to Sonia.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
That's partly how you can tell it's interesting and valid, because it also is controversial. One of the things he's established, which is of cardinal importance, is that our perceptions of other people are not mostly biased. Right? This is...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
We should be doing this with all the questionnaires. It's the same with narcissism. If you put... See, the other thing you could do with ChatGPT is you could say, here's 20 items significant of narcissism, okay? Which is the central item? And can you generate 20 items that are better markers of that central tendency?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
And the thing is, it can do it because it's mapped the linguistic representations.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
So all the factor structures already built into the ChatGPT systems, like all of it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
Yeah. So, okay. So, this is one of the things I would pursue if I still had a research lab, right? These things are hard to pursue without having that infrastructure in place. But I think this is radically... Speed up the... Yeah, yeah. Radically speed up the process of... I totally see that. And also make it much more reliable and valid.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
Okay. Absolutely. All right, so back to... Yeah, yeah. All right, so now you've got people voting for one comic or the other.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
And so the questionnaires predicted that?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
Yeah, yeah. It's a great study. Another thing you might want to do is take that questionnaire, do an item analysis with regards to preference, and rank order the items in terms of their predictive validity in relationship to the cartoon, because you might be able to see which of the items are central. Especially if you saw that pattern across multiple cartoons. Yeah, yeah. Okay, okay.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
Well, how many studies have you done now on left-wing authoritarianism?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
The contrary claim is rather preposterous, which is that all of the categories that we use to structure our interactions with other people are based on the power distortion of our perceptions, let's say, which is essentially a... and postmodern claim. And Lee became infamous, at least in part, because he showed that our perceptions, our stereotypes, if you will, are mostly accurate.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
Yeah, those are probably studies that I'd run across of yours.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
Well, it's one thing to say that DEI programs work. It's another thing to say they don't work. And it's a completely different thing to say they do the opposite of what... Yeah, that's not good. And it seems to me highly probable. Yeah. You know, suicide prevention programs, the kind the government's always running, they make suicide rates go up. Well, because- Why?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
you're advertising and normalizing suicide, right? And you think, well, we're gonna put up a prevention program. It's like, first, are you clinically trained? Second, did you do the research? Third, did you ever stop to consider that your conceptualization of the problem might be inadequate in relationship to its solution? There's so many things like this that happen.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
Clinicians have become, the research-oriented clinicians have become very, very sensitive to such things because it's frequently the case that a well-meaning intervention will make things worse. And then you might ask why. It's like, well, there's 50,000 ways something could be worse and like one way it could be better.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
And so just, it's an overwhelmingly high probability that whatever you do to change something that works makes it worse. Right. Okay. So now, so do you, what was your evidence that the DEI interventions made? What was made worse? What interventions and what was your evidence linking them? Yes. Okay.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
so the podcast today took a turn back to the psychological which is an improvement over the political as far as i'm concerned generally speaking um likely because the topic of concentration has more long-lasting significance, all things considered.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
Yeah, okay, okay, fine, fine. So you used that as a validation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
There are sources of bias, and they do enter into the process, and they're relevant. But that's a very different claim than that the foundations of our perceptions themselves are indistinguishable from the biases we hold as motivated agents. And so... His work is extremely important. It's core to the culture war that is tearing us apart.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
Okay, so I'm going to put on my devil's advocate hat. Yes. And I'm going to play Robin D'Angelo, despite wearing this Trump badge. And I'm going to say, well... The effects of institutional racism are so pervasive that they even invaded your experimental material.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
And the consequence of being exposed to the contents of my writing, speaking as Robin D'Angelo, was that the scales fell from the eyes of your experimental subjects, and they were able to perceive the racism that we claimed was there in a manner they couldn't before.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
How do you know that your own implicit bias didn't stop you from seeing the bias that was there? Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
Okay, so you regard it as highly improbable that what they were reading into the situation. You regard it as highly probable that they were reading into the situation. Okay, let me ask you a couple more technical questions.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
How much of this material were they exposed to before they did the evaluation? About a paragraph. Just a paragraph. Just a paragraph. How soon before the evaluation? Pretty soon. Okay. Do you have any idea what the lag time, like if you did a dose response study, so to speak, is there a decay? Like how permanent are the effects?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
I know I couldn't expect you to do all that in one study, but it's germane, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
Right, fair enough. Well, I would also say probably you evaluated some of the weaker systemic effects of that kind of rhetoric, because it isn't merely exposure to the rhetoric, it's the fact that post hoc detection of such things as microaggressions, let's say, are radically rewarded by the participants in those ideological systems. That's a more powerful effect.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
So, if you're interested in the definition of perception, the relationship between perception and reality, and the analysis of bias in a manner that's credible, then pay attention to this podcast and get things cleared up. So I guess we might as well get right to the point.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
So you got it with weak exposure, fundamentally. Okay, so- Right, and no reward, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
Exactly, exactly. Yes, yes, yes. So- So I would say the weakness of your intervention demonstrated the power of the rhetoric. Okay, what did Kendi have to say about this? He described us as racist pseudoscientists. Oh, yeah. Okay, well, that pretty much covers the territory. Did he say why? Or was that unnecessary? You know, that quote— How are you at wasting money?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
My sense is that he was particularly good at that. So, yeah, university money, counterproductively.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
Yeah, right, right, right. Okay, well, then we can just let it go. So, okay, okay. Okay, you said that produced quite a splash, including enhanced probability of being on this podcast, for example. Yes, yes. So I'd followed your work for a long time before coming across that. What effect has it had? When was the study published, first of all? Well, so— And is it a sequence? Is it a single study?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
Oh, yeah, I talked to moderate Democrats who told me that Antifa was a figment of the right-wing imagination. Yes, right. But, you know, there's something weird about that that's very much worth pointing out, I believe, is that we radically underestimate the effect...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
And the first thing I'm curious about is, and this is something I think that can be fairly definitively laid at the feet of social psychologists, was that there was an absolute denial that anything like left-wing authoritarianism existed, even conceptually, literally until 2016. Yeah, that's right. For 60 years. I came across that and I thought...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
very small minority of people who are organized can have in destabilizing a society for example in the flux of the aftermath of World War one Russia was Chaotic enough so that a very small minority of people that would be the Bolsheviks destabilized and captured the entire country so even if The true radicals on the left are 3%. Say, well, 97% of them are peaceful.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
It's like, fair enough, but you're suffering from the delusion that a demented minority is harmless.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
Yeah, that's exactly what you'd expect. Of course that's going to happen.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
what do you mean there's no such thing as left-wing authoritarianism? We know that. It's like, that's insane.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
Well, that is what they do.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
They can dance in the ashes that way. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. The real criminal psychopaths, the short-term guys, the narcissists, they thrive in chaos. Yeah. Because they're... Their niche is chaos, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
And that's where your studies were, were what?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
And then there were a couple of papers published in 2016 on left-wing authoritarianism in the Soviet Union. That was the first... breaking of that dam. I did a master's, I supervised a master's thesis at that time. It's a very good thesis on left-wing authoritarianism. And because we showed that there were statistical clumps of reliably
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
So why that approach with regards to the dissemination of this information, this particular experimental information, rather than the more standard journal approach?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
It's... unforgivable. Yeah, that's right. It needs to be that whole system I've been thinking about.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
It's like in this day and age, a two-year lag to publication, it's completely insane.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
You spend 30% of your time writing grand applications that go nowhere and two years to lag to publication that almost no one is likely to read. That's right. How the hell have you not been cancelled? Why is that? Because it's weird. There have been repeat attempts to cancel me that have failed. Okay. Well, so why don't you tell me and everybody else, first of all, why you're, what would you say?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
Why you so richly deserve canceling. That's the first issue. And then the next issue, which is of equal importance, is how you've managed to not have that happen. Because that's actually really hard.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
Because if people try to cancel you, especially given the things that you've researched and have insisted upon and said, if people try to cancel you, there's an overwhelming probability in academia in particular that that will be successful. So let's start by talking about the sorts of things that you've been pointing to in academia.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
Well, in academia in general, and then more specifically in psychology and social psychology.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
characterizable left-wing authoritarian beliefs that did in fact associate statistically and that identifiable groups of people with identifiable temperamental proclivities did hold. I really wanted to follow up on that because it was very rich potential source of new
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
Okay, there's a distinction there, too, that we should draw. Clearly, it's the case that if you want to draw generalizable conclusions about human beings from a study, that the study participants should be a randomly selected and representative sample of the population to whom you're attempting to generalize. Obviously. Because otherwise it doesn't generalize.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
information but my academic career exploded at that point it became impossible so people have taken that have taken that ball and run with it yeah yeah so well yeah yeah tell us about it what have you found well okay how do you let's let's start with some definitions like what constitutes left wing as opposed to right wing authoritarianism let's say right so there are measurement
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
That's very different than making the case that underrepresented groups should be preferentially hired or employed or promoted or specified.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
One of the great movies of all time.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
So for example... Yes, with two seconds of thought, it's a positive thing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
Or that people should be free of...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
And that's very well documented.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
Now, how many faculty members at colleges and universities do you suppose there are in the United States approximately? Do you have any idea?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
I have looked into it. It's very large. So that means there's 80,000 academic activists who are being employed full time in the United States.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
Do you think they'd be less liberal? I don't know. Bias?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
Okay, so it's not 80,000, but it could easily be 50,000. Yes, yes. Okay, so that's a number I want to return to. Okay, okay. Yeah, because there's implications.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
It was a very narrow... See, that's actually the fundamental flaw of intersectionality, is intersectionality devolves into combinatorial explosion almost immediately, right? Because...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
once you start combining the categories of oppression, you don't have to make, your list of combinations, black, women, gay, et cetera, every time you add another variable to that multiplicative list, you decrease the pool of people that occupy that list radically, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
But there's also an infinite, there's literally an indefinite, this is your point, an indefinite number of potentially relevant group categories Yes. So how in the world are you going to ensure that every possible combination of every possible group category is... You can't even measure it, much less ensure it. Yeah, you can't do that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
So there's this underlying insistence, which you're pointing to, I believe, that there are privileged categories of oppressed people. And it's a weird thing. It's like, why is it that it's race... and sex. And you might think, well, those are the most obvious differences between people, and maybe you can make that case.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
But then it's also gender, which is a very weird insistence, because whether the idea of gender is a valid... I don't think the idea of gender is a valid idea at all. I think it's super... It's, what would you say, it's a warped misconceptualization of everything that's captured by temperament much more accurately and precisely. We can talk about that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
But also sexual orientation, I can't see at all why that would emerge as a privileged category of oppression alongside something like sex. Like it could, but it's not obvious why. Okay, so you're pointing some of, and then you said, well, there's important elements of diversity, especially intellectually. That's right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
adequate distribution of political or ethical views across the spectrum that's completely off the table. Yeah, it's completely off the table.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
Okay, so I just want to provide people some background on this and correct me if I get any of this wrong. Scientists publish in research journals, and they generally publish articles of two types. One type would be a research study, an actual experiment, let's say, or a sequence of experiments. And the other, I guess there's two other types. There's reviews and there's commentaries. And so...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
So, in any case, I spoke today with Lee Jussom, and Lee is a distinguished professor of psychology at Rutgers, and he's been the chair there of the Department of Psychology, and separately of anthropology, which is a peculiar happenstance that we discuss in the podcast. I was interested in Lee's work because there's a lot of trouble in the field of social psychology.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
And then there's a variety of different journals that scientists publish in, and some of those cover all scientific topics, science and nature. The world's premier scientific journals used to do that before they became woke institutions. And then there are specialized journals that cover fields like psychology, and then there are sub-specialized journals.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
The less specialized the journal, all things considered, the more prestigious it is. Anyways, that's where scientists publish. And they do publish commentaries on each other's material, especially if it's a review of something contentious or something that's emerging in the field.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
And now, this journal, Perspectives on Psychological Science, there's also an interesting backstory here because that's an American Psychological Society journal. Yes. Okay, so there's two major... organizations for psychologists, especially research-oriented psychologists in North America.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
There's the American Psychological Association, which has its journals, and then a newer organization, which is now a couple of decades old, American Psychological Society. And the American Psychological Society was actually set up, at least in part, because the American Psychological Association
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
had started to become ideologically dominated, particularly in the leftist and progressive direction, and that that was having an arguably negative effect on research, reliability, accuracy, and probability of publication. That was set up 25... Okay, so that's a little off-kilter. Okay, okay.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
Well, okay, so yeah, yeah, yeah, fair enough. But See, I was watching that happen because I knew some of the people who were setting up the APS at the time.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
And my sense, though, also was that part of the reason that the APA was tilting in a more and more clinical direction was because there was an underlying political ethos that was increasingly skeptical of science as the privileged mode of obtaining valid information.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
I think that's fair. Yes. So the proximal cause was the overemphasis on the clinical. But, you know, it's also the case that, as you've seen, is that certainly the clinical psychology and the whole therapeutic enterprise has taken a cataclysmic turn towards the woke direction in the last, especially in the last 10 years. It's been absolutely devastating. And I don't know, is social psychology...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
I think you could probably say the same thing about social psychology. Maybe you could say maybe that's even worse. Anyways, we can get into that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
Right, so I presume that these 1,400 are a subset of the 50,000 activists.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
Right now. I'm curious about the 1,400 too, because you often see legacy media headline news that 1,400 scientists have signed some petitions. But then when you look into it, you know, it's often... I know the distinction between graduate student and, let's say, full-fledged scientist is murky. But part of the issue is always, well, exactly who were these 1,400 people, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
And out from under which rocks did they climb? And so who were the 1,400? Like, roughly speaking, who were these people that-
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I see. I see.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
Okay, so that's a very interesting definition, though, because you're pointing to the fact that arguably, and tell me if you think this is right, the core of authoritarianism, which, as you said, can't be measured outside the political, isn't precisely political. It's your attitude towards those who don't agree with you. Yes, it is.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
scientists publish their research findings and their reviews of the literature in scientific journals and it's one of the ways that the quality of these articles is vetted is by submitting the manuscripts before they're published to
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
Well, first of all, the editor reviews them to see if they're even vaguely possibly suitable for publication in that particular journal on the basis of, let's say, topic and quality and apparent integrity of research. Then they're sent out to experts in that area, multiple experts. for analysis, and that's part of the quality control process.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
And that worked pretty well up until about 2015, I would say, or maybe even spectacularly well, all things considered. So that's the peer review process. What happened in this case was the reviews of this, the peer reviews of this particular article were of sufficient quality so that the editor decided that they might... Invite them as commentary. Right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
They might turn into standalone pieces with some development.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
And Jordan, that is exactly... Was that included when it was published or was that... I don't remember.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
Okay, so now they're broadly overseeing the group of journals that publish under their ages. Yes, that's right. Okay, but they generally don't have an editorial say.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
Right, but it's still the case that generally they don't do such things. Yeah, they don't do this, right. Partly because often... Well, they don't have the specialized expertise, at least in part, which is partly why they hire the editors to begin with, who then they give pretty much carte blanche. Yes, right. As they should, because that's part of academic freedom. That's right. Right. Yes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
Okay, but they decided that they were not going to proceed with the publication.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
But you have to have some beliefs for that to be... I didn't say can't.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
Well, that's good, but that doesn't— What, what? Detract from the seriousness of the allegation. The fact that he was able to successfully wend his way through the thicket.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
So how the hell did they... complainants get access to the papers? Like, how did they know what the papers were if they hadn't been published?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
I was just curious because it's strange that A brouhaha of that sort would emerge prior to publication. But there was quasi-publication.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
On what grounds do you think this investigation was made? How was the progression of this investigation justified? I mean, there's no established precedent in the scientific community for re-evaluating an editorial decision based on political objection, right? We'll reevaluate if 500 people sign a petition. This isn't the domain of rule or principle or tradition.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
Okay, so I'm thinking about that clinically. It's like... Well, that's where you'd start to look at overlap between cluster B personality psychopathology, narcissism, borderline personality disorder, histrionic, because those are the people who are very likely to elevate their own status at the cost of other people, including their children and those they purport to love.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
So what's the fear here, do you think? These 1,400 people signed this petition, which is something that takes like two seconds and costs you nothing and has no risk to you whatsoever. And so it's not an ethical statement of any profundity unless you're an activist. So what was it, do you think, that... raised people's hackles about the mere fact that these complaints had been raised?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
To this second, I don't really know.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
The mere fact of questioning the diversity agenda constitutes racism.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
But... At least once per paper submitted.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
That's right. Yes, well, has that not been formally tested as a hypothesis? If it has, I don't know.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
It's something like, more broadly speaking, is that are there... It's a mechanism of gaming the reputation domain, right? Because obviously, our reputations are probably arguably the most valuable commodity, so to speak, that we possess. system of value is susceptible to gaming in a variety of ways.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
And one way of gaming the reputational game is to make claims of reputational virtue that are risk-free, broad, immediate, and cost-free.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
And for me, if you're accused of something, and I can say, and accused of transgressing against a group towards whom I feel guilt, I can signify my valor as a moral agent by also denouncing you. And it costs me nothing, right? Which is a big problem, right? It's like, maybe it's the problem of our time. It's a very big problem. It's a huge problem.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
Especially now, because there's something else that's happened, right? Is that Groups of denunciators can get together with much greater ease than they ever could. Yes, because of social media. And the effort necessary to make a denunciation has plummeted to zero. Right. And the consequences of making a false denunciation are also zero.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
This is not good. It's like denunciation firestorm time. And that's certainly happening.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
Yeah, well, just because something's advantageous for some people in the short run does not mean that it's good for the whole game in the medium to long run. Right. That's for sure. Yes, that's right. That's exactly that. Well, that's actually, I think, in some ways, the definition of an impulsive moral error.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
Like, if it accrues benefit to you in the short run but does you in in the medium run, that's not a very wise strategy. Yes. Right? And that's what impulsive people do all the time. Yes. Right, right. That's even the definition of what constitutes a temptation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
Any place infiltrated by narcissists is going to be susceptible to exactly, and narcissists will use whatever political stance gains them the most immediate credibility, completely independent of the validity of the ideological stance. See, one of the things, we'll get back to the story right away.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
See, one of the things I've observed, this is very interesting, because I've talked to a lot of moderate progressives, let's say, or actually even genuine liberals within the Democrat, congressmen and senators, many of them. And I've been struck by one thing. And I'm curious about what you think about this.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
We know that a tilt towards empathy, so agreeableness, trade agreeableness, a tilt, tilts you in a liberal direction and maybe in a progressive direction. And there are concomitants of being more agreeable on the personality side. But I think one of them is that The moderates that I've talked to always denied the existence of the pathological radicals on the left.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
And I've really thought, I mean, this is to a man or woman. Yeah, yeah. And I think what it is, I think it has something to do with the unwillingness or inability of the more liberal types to have imagination for evil. Like, I would make the case that most criminals You could validly interpret most criminals whose criminal history is sporadic and short as victims.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
They've come from abusive families, alcoholic families, often multi-generationally antisocial families, etc. But there's a subset of criminals. It's 1% of the criminals, 65% of the crimes. There's a subset of criminals who are not victims. They are really monsters. And I don't think there's any imagination for the monstrous among the compassionate left, it's all victims.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
It doesn't matter how egregious the crime. Now, that's something I would have tested as a social psychologist if I still had an active research lab, which I don't. But the problem with what we know that we know from simulations that networks of cooperators can establish themselves in a way that's mutually beneficial and productive. But that if a shark is dropped into a tank of cooperators,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
then the shark takes everything. So the problem with being agreeable and cooperative is that the monsters can get you. And if you're temperamentally tilted towards denying the existence of the monster so much the worse. Now, I made that case because you talked about the relationship between narcissism and left-wing authoritarianism. I mean, narcissism shades into sadism as well.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
And so this is a very big problem, especially with online denunciation. Okay, so back to 2022. Now there's... debate about whether these papers are going to proceed to publication. Right, they were... And there's allegations made against the people who wrote the reviews.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
So why did Smith have such an outsized say in all this? Like, that isn't how the scientific process generally works. So they once... APS...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
Nothing at the moment comes to mind. I have a memory of a memory of something associated with that, because I've tried to follow the literature, but I've definitely seen it emerge on the left. Correlations on the right. Well, from what I remember, and I'm vague about this because I can't give you sources, is that dark tetrad traits stand out quite markedly as associated with authoritarianism.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
So they were... Maybe they also thought it was trouble they didn't need.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
When you're working for a scientific journal, you're not doing it for the money, right? It's a lot of work. And the editors, was he paid? Was that his full-time job? It was not his full-time job, and I don't know whether he was paid. Right, right. Okay, so that just illustrates the point, is that people are doing this because that's actually what you do as a scientist.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
There's not a lot of, you know, it's a prestigious position and you meet people. You have a certain say over the direction the field might go. And those are perks, but generally people do this like they do peer review because it's part of the tradition of scientific activity. Right. Right, right. That's right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
And so you can see why people might bail out if it was going to just be nothing but reputation catastrophe. Exactly, right. Because they'd be thinking, why the hell am I going to expose myself to this dismal risk when it's already hard and there's very little upside?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
Despite this, despite the... Because of it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
And I thought that was somewhat independent of whether it was left or right. But I can't provide the sources out there. I review them in this new book I wrote on We Who Wrestle With God. There's a lot of reference to the dark tetrad personality constellations and the political manifestations. But okay, but you've been studying it. Okay, so when we looked at...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
Well, this is a good thing for people to know, too. You know, if you've watched my podcast, you know because I say this all the time that... mythologically speaking, that every treasure has a dragon, right? And that's a representation of the world, because the world is full of threat and opportunity.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
And the co-association of the dragon and the treasure is a mythological trope indicating that there's opportunity where there's peril. But there's a corollary to that, which is a very interesting one, which is where there's peril, there's opportunity. And so you might think when
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
something negative happens to you, let's say on the social side, that you become the brunt of a cancellation attempt, you might think, oh my God, my life's over. It's like, yeah, that's one possible outcome. That's the same outcome as ending up as dragon toast, let's say. But the other outcome is that you find the treasure that's associated with the dragon, and that can definitely happen.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
And that's a good thing to know because it means that when things become shaky around you, one of the things you can validly ask yourself is, there's something positive lurking here if I had the wisdom to see it and the, what would you say, the capacity for transformation necessary to allow the challenge to change me. Yeah, that's right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
Well, you know what Nietzsche said, if it doesn't kill you, it makes you stronger. Now, unfortunately, there's an if. Well, seriously, right? Yes, absolutely. And the if is that the dragon is real. It's not a game.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
So your point about... You have to get rid of the remaining conservatives.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
So there's some concrete recommendations that can be brought out of that too. I would say, like, if you find yourself in serious trouble, this is one of the things I learned about I learned from dealing with very dangerous people in my clinical practice, let's say, dangerous and unstable people. It's a very bad idea to lie when you're in trouble. It's a seriously bad idea.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
The way we developed our measure, because I'd like to know how you developed yours, is we took a very large sample of political opinions and then factor analyzed them to find out if we could identify first clumps of left-wing and clumps of right-wing belief, which you can clearly identify.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
And so if the mob or the monster comes for you, your best defense is... extremely cautious, plain truth. Now that's very different than trying to, what would you say, strategize and manipulate your way out of a difficult situation. It's also very different than apologizing. And my experience on the woke mob cancellation side is,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
If you lie in your own defense or falsify your speech, you're in serious trouble. And if you apologize, a different mob will just come for you. That'll be the post-apology mob that comes for you. It's not a good idea. So what we've been outlining here is the fact that if you're in serious social peril, there's two outcomes. One is that
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
Perversely enough, in retrospect, it might turn out to be an opportunity and one you wouldn't forego now that you know the consequences. That's not impossible, but it's difficult. The other one is, is you're seriously done. And so then the question is, what can you do to maximize the possibility of the former and minimize the latter? And those are some things that I know. So, okay, okay.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
So let's back up a bit then. We still haven't exactly described why the cancellation attempts weren't successful for you. Now, you said you demonstrated your ability to keep a calm head under fire and that you did that well enough so the university actually recognized that and that turned out to be of substantive benefit to you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
But we don't know why it was that you maintained a calm head under fire or how you did that without... Well, having the reputation damage that was certainly directly implied by the accusation take you out. Like, do you have, was it good fortune? Were there things you did right? Like, how do you assess that?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
And then to look within the left-wing constellation to see if there is a reliable subcategory of clearly authoritarian proclivities.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
And people forget. That's the weird thing, because the present is so large. Yes. You're going to panic. Yes. Yeah, yeah. Don't panic. Don't panic. That's right. Don't panic. Don't assume that it's going to be successful. That's right. Because people... They might be interested in you today, but they weren't interested in you yesterday. They probably won't be interested in you tomorrow.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
And we found the biggest predictor of left-wing authoritarianism was low verbal IQ. It was a walloping predictor, negative 0.40.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
Let me add something to that. Yeah, yeah. No, not if you genuinely believe it, because you might not be your own best defender. That's why you have a Fifth Amendment. No, seriously. Conscientious... Guilt-prone people will accuse themselves. So then I would say, if you feel that you've done something wrong, remember the presumption of innocence before provable guilt. Remember that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
It applies to you too. And then go talk to five or six people that you trust and lay out the argument on both sides and see if they think you're the bad guy. That's good.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
Don't assume that you're morally obligated to apologize, even if you feel guilty. That's right. Because your guilt feelings are not an unerring indication of your guilt. That's right. And may distort how you think about your culpability.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
See, this is why I think, too, the council mob is particularly effective against genuine conservatives. Because genuine conservatives tilt towards higher conscientiousness. And it's very easy to make conscientious people feel guilty. Right, right. So that can be weaponized.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
Yeah, go silent. Including... You can always apologize in a month after you've thought it through if anyone still cares. That's right. Okay, go silent.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
immense predictor yeah so so that's something to continue because you know one of the things we talked about at the beginning of the podcast was that some of these ideas sound good in the absence of further critical evaluation so that you might say well if you lack the capacity for deep verbal critical evaluation what apparently moral ideas would appeal to you and well you can imagine that there might be a set of them and one of them would be well don't be mean to people who aren't like you
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
Yeah, that's especially true if someone's interviewing you. Yeah, it's like record all of it. Record all of it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
That's also why you need that time of silence is to muster your resources. Yes. And you could also assume, even if people are nervous in the aftermath of the accusations for two or three days or a week even, they may come to their senses as the...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
A lot of the claims of the field are not true. Now, you got to expect that in scientific inquiry because a lot of the things we believe are false and the whole reason that we practice as scientists is to correct those falsehoods. And it's also the case that
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
Okay, so there is... Okay, so given all that, it's less surprising that that speculation might have arisen in relationship to your analogy. Right, right. Things you find out too late.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
You know, which is a perfectly good rule of thumb. Yes, absolutely. But that doesn't mean it's the... It doesn't mean that everyone who says that's what they're for are, in fact, agitating on behalf of that principle.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
So let me ask you a question about strategy there too. I've spent a lot of time strategizing with people because that was a big part of my clinical practice. But in terms of... silence and then mustering your support network, right? And then you said, well, you can start your defense. It's like... My sense is that a good offense is a very strong defense. Yes. Right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
Because you can, if you're careful now, you know, you can defend yourself or you can turn the tables. And I would say if you're turning the tables because you're angry, that's not a good idea because you're going to make mistakes in your strategizing. Right. I think you can distinguish that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
The search for justice and truth from the search for revenge by the intermediating role of especially resentment. If you're resentfully angry, your head isn't clear. But if you can quell that and you want to establish the truth and you can do that with a certain amount of detachment, then a good defensive strategy is offense. It's like what's actually... You can flip the table, so to speak, and...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
The problem with a defense is there's something... Well, there's something defensible. There's something defensible.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
Well, I might have made a mistake. Yes, right, absolutely, right. No, no, you're seriously wrong. Yeah, yeah. And in a manner that's actually detrimental to the cause you purport to be putting forward.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
All right, look, we have to stop this part of the discussion, even though there's like 50 other things I want to talk to you about, but we'll continue. I'm going to, I think, focus the discussion on the Daily Wire side. You guys listening on YouTube know about this, that we do another half an hour there. I think I'm going to talk about... categorization and implicit bias.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
And delve a little bit more into social psychology's role, for better or worse, in promoting many of the policies, the DEI policies, for example, and justifying them hypothetically on scientific grounds. I want to delve into that because it's definitely been social psychologists who've been
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
particularly interested in the issue of implicit bias, even though to some degree that notion came from the clinical world, including from people like Carl Jung, who were very interested in the idea of complex and implicit association back in the 1920s.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
Anyways, there's a veneer of scientific respectability that's been laid over the diversity, inclusivity, and equity claims, the notion of implicit and systemic bias. And that's always bothered me because I think the social psychologists have done a terrible job distinguishing between categorization, which is like the basis of perception itself, bias, because you can't consider categorization bias.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
It's like, that's insane. That's insane, even though the postmodernists really do make that claim. And Lee's done work too, looking at the accuracy of such things as so-called stereotypes, because what's the difference between a stereotype and a category? That is a hard question. You could spend a thousand years trying to figure that out.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
Anyways, I think that's what we'll delve into if you want to join us on the Daily Wire side. And so thank you very much, sir, for offering what you know and also your story. to the more general public and join us on the Daily Royal side if you want to continue with the discussion.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
Do you think there are good scales now for left and right-wing authoritarianism? Adequate scales?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
You can tell if someone's belief is part of a set of identifiable beliefs. If they hold that belief, the fact they hold that belief predicts reliably that they hold another belief, right? And then you want to see a pattern like that emerge across a lot of people. Then you see that there are associations of ideas, right? Those would be something like, the manifestation of an ideology.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
You want to see if that's identifiable, what its boundaries are, that it can be distinguished from other clumps of ideas. So left could be distinguished from right. This can all be done statistically and very reliably. Now, it wasn't done by social psychologists from the end of World War II till 2016. Shameful lacuna in the history of political analysis within the psychological community.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
It shocked me when I first discovered it. Me too. It was shocking. It's like, really? Talk about blind spots. Oh, my God. It's like, oh, do you guys miss Mao and Stalin? Yeah, I know, right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
How do you miss that? It's fairly obvious. You're a social psychologist. A biggest... social movements of the 20, the biggest pathological social movements of the 20th century had their existence denied for 70 years. Mind boggling. It's mind boggling. I've never recovered from discovery. It took me like a year to even believe it was true. Okay, so you're using other people's questions.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
So what's your approach?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
much of what's published is not going to be true because the alternative would be that everything that was published was a discovery that was true and we'd be overwhelmed by novelty so fast that it would be untenable if that ever happened. Lee is one of the rarer social psychologists who's actually a scientist and He's done a lot of interesting and also controversial work.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
So the true nature of American liberty.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
So is that a benevolent left view and an authoritarian left view?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
Demonizing America versus... We did find in our analysis that there's a liberal left that's clear and there's an authoritarian left. And the liberal left, this is part of our investigation, the liberal left isn't... Now did we figure that out? The liberal left doesn't partake of the attitudes of the Radical authoritarian.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
Yes, but they're the ones that I also think that they're sort of oblivious nice.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
I think that's true And we that is what we found we found in the study. I got a research idea. Yes. Yes It's relevant to this well with regards to these questionnaires. It's something that I wanted to do You know the large language models track statistical probability so you can take those left-wing Questionnaire sets and you can ask chat GPT. Here's an item or here's three items generate 30 more
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
and it doesn't. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right, so if you wanted to improve the statistical reliability of the measures, so you can imagine, take the measures that already exist, put them in clumps of three in ChatGPT, have it expanded out to like 300 items, administer it to a thousand people and distill it. Because the thing- That's a great idea.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
507. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim
This will speed things up radically because the thing about the large language models is they already have the statistical correlations built in. When you ask ChatGPT to generate 40 items that are conceptually like these four, that's what it does. It's not an opinion. So you can use ChatGP to purify the questionnaires. And you can do that on the left and on the right.