Read on Twitter
Have been bingeing @moreofcomment this weekend, specifically on social psych’s myopia wrt. the is–ought gap, and I’m struck again by the fact that the discipline broadly seems to have forgotten how moral progress has been made. 1/ https://twitter.com/moreofcomment/status/1287046024003907584
Soc psy as a formal discipline is, what, a century old? At most? Moral progress is a lot older than that! The golden rule is a few millennia old, as is concept of the equality of all citizens. Women’s suffrage is a century old (at least in Aus, rest of you guys suck). 2/
“We hold these truths…” did not depend on soc psy. The abolition of slavery did not depend on soc psy. The creation of human rights did not depend on soc psy. Rawls’s maximin principle does not depend on soc psy. Little moral progress has been obviously dependent on soc psy. 3/
The purely descriptive statistic “a white person on average will sit significantly further from a black person in a waiting room than from another white person” is (clearly) indicative of a bad thing. This is true regardless of whether the IAT score predicts it. 4/
It is true because of the moral progress we’ve already made. As @paulrconnor notes in the podcast, most liberal-democratic citizens think that diversity is ceteris paribus a good thing on the basis of the moral progress we’ve already made. 5/
In other words, descriptive research clearly showing something we all agree to be bad is perfectly sufficient (audit studies are a great example). The “sexy” post-hoc soc psy theorising adds, or at least should add, very little moral impetus. 6/
So yes, we shouldn’t overstate claims on moral issues because it’s bad science—but also because we also don’t need to. “All humans are created equal” mostly gets you 100% of the way there, and if someone disagrees with that, morality—not science—should be your first recourse. 7/
Obviously this blurs the lines a bit— e.g. Aristotle’s ethics, and his support of slavery, are rooted in his theory of biology and soul. Science and the concept of all humans’ being equal obviously had a mixed relationship during the Enlightenment. 8/
But, again, we’ve made moral progress since then. The validity of implicit bias (or of stereotype threat, or insert construct here) does not impact that. 9/
Similarly, I’d argue the moral case needs to be made against something like microaggressions more-or-less independent of the effect sizes. If we decide getting rid of microaggressions is moral progress, then we’re done. No soc psy needed. 10/
Social psychology can and should illuminate the dynamics of social phenomena, but we made plenty of moral progress without it and can clearly continue to do so. If it stops seeing itself as the vanguard of moral progress maybe everyone can chillax and get back to research. /end
