Saving the Social Sciences (w/Michael Jindra)

Utterly Moderate Podcast

We’ve talked a lot on the Utterly Moderate Podcast about how both liberals and conservatives in America are bombarded with misleading information on a regular basis.

On the left, unfortunately, a lot of this bad info comes from an academic research community which is overwhelmingly liberal. A recent study found the least imbalanced discipline to be engineering, which was still 62% liberal professors. Political science was 89%, psychology 94%, and sociology 98%, while some disciplines had no political conservatives at all.

This significant one-sidedness means that the people doing the research as well as the people checking to make sure that research is high quality before it is published all have similar ideological blind spots, and this is allowing too much misleading information to make it into the public discourse, where it is often perceived by average citizens as being backed by solid evidence when that just isn’t so.

On this episode host Lawrence Eppard is joined by anthropologist Michael Jindra from Boston University’s Institute on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs to talk about this problem and hopefully offer some ways to save the social sciences from themselves.

Check out just some of the great insights Jindra has to offer in his article in the Chronicle of Higher Education titled, “When Ideology Drives Social Science.”

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Episode Audio:

• "Air Background Corporate" by REDCVT (Free Music Archive)
• "Please Listen Carefully" by Jahzzar (Free Music Archive)
• "Last Dance" by Jahzzar (Free Music Archive)
• “Happy Trails (To You)” by the Riders in the Sky (used with artist’s permission)