melissikins:

fuckyeahemergence:

Surveys asking people about their own political identity are irrelevant to the post…

If Noelle-Neuman “describes a political orientation as a set of beliefs and values that work together as an approach to social justice,” that’s nice but again not relevant at all. Many many people (including numerous academics) have their own idiosyncratic and oft-conflicting definitions of “left” vs. “right,” which they usually fashion to favor their own personal identity and group loyalties.

For instance, Topalova (according to you) defines “left and right political orientations” as “essentially opposing belief systems about power.” So either left v. right is essentially about approaches to social justice (Noelle-Neuman) or opposing belief systems about power (Topalova). Those are different words because they mean different things, though both “social justice” and “power” are so vague as to be practically meaningless without explicit technical definition themselves.

People do use leftism and right-wing to mean things. They are not pure gibberish. However they are not useful for communication of logical, means-to-ends positions or arguments on the sociopolitical. Rather they tend to inhibit critical thinking and encourage irrational identity politics, partisan superficiality, and debates restricted to an unnecessarily dichotomized set of options.

Also, I just read your Farwell & Weiner paper and I have to say I forgot how incredibly bad the papers in lower-end psych journals are:

Study 1

Method

Participants. Ninety-six students taking an undergraduate course in psychology completed the materials at the end of a regularly scheduled class meeting. Participation was voluntary and the respondents were assured of their anonymity.

So we’re talking about a written survey on political identity from a self-selected sample taken out of some undergrad psych class and the end of a period. Not randomized, not blinded. Can’t be extrapolated to anything significant at all about any general population. Same for Study 2. This is the exact methodological equivalent to some teacher saying “here’s what some of the students in my class who had nothing better to do said.” Completely worthless.

Psychology as a discipline is rife with truly awful selection bias, but I’ve always been taught that 96 subjects should give you enough statistical power to work with.

Right, what makes the survey worthless is not the sample size, though that n=96 could certainly be problematic for uncertainty given the large populations we’re talking about. What really makes the survey worthless is that is has no external validity: the sample is not representative of the population, is not randomly selected from the population, and is not blinded in selection.

 Also, I don’t think that ideas about social justice and ideas about power are mutually exclusive, and the terms have been explored and defined within psychology, so there is a particular context I’m working within that cuts down on the vagueness. I would argue that power is at the heart of social justice (the mechanism through which it operates).

“Social justice” and “power” have many different definitions within the extremely broad field of “psychology” and even moreso across nominal academic fields. That “power” and “justice” may be mechanistically related by some explicit definitions in certain contexts (as you posit), which doesn’t mean at all that they can be conceptually or definitionally conflated. Empirically determining and publishing the consensus definitions of words is lexicography, not psychology.

In re-reading your post, I am somewhat confused. Genuinely confused, not bitchy internet troll confused. I think we’re approaching this question from vastly different standpoints and honestly I don’t think I know quite enough about where you’re coming from to really critique it.

I am not really understanding why self report is not relevant in this situation and why political orientation as a personal identity is not, in itself, an indicator of positions. Or positions themselves. Yes, the terms ‘right’ and ‘left’ are vague and problematic, but we conceive of them as having qualitatively different features and people cluster around this because of this conception. Which means in some sense they actually are different. Added to this that there is a good deal of commonality between the topics that end up categorized as left and right in multiple places, and I think there is reason to treat them like they have important meanings. It seems like you want them to have inherent differences, perhaps? But that is confusing to me as political orientations must be socially constructed (since sociopolitical systems are socially constructed), and social constructions by their nature do not have inherent characteristics beyond people’s opinions/identities/experiences/what have you.

All language is a social construction. Even mathematics is a social construction. No human knowledge of anything can be demonstrated beyond human experience (duh). I’m certainly not saying “leftism” and “rightism” need to have demonstrable inherent metaphysical reality to have meaning or any nonsensical thing.

What I’m saying is that people use leftism and rightism to mean all kinds of different things (to the point of them being nonsensical without technical definition) and that their usage is vague and problematic, while adding nothing of intellectual substance. Furthermore, the concept of “left-right” dichotomy or spectrum of sociopolitical positions is inherently problematic for intelligent communication of means-to-ends ideas, and it inherently encourages groupthink, group loyalty, and personal identity signaling in place of such intelligent communication.

Indeed many people ideologically cluster their political self-identities and group loyalties around “left” and “right.” That’s precisely the problem…

On the mention of ‘irratonal identity politics’: this is bothering me. I am not entirely sure what you mean by this, but it is reading to me as a minimization of the importance of lived experience (due to various social categories) on sociopolitical perspectives. This reads to me as a very privilege-protecting thing to think, as it says that only particular things are legit for this kind of discussion, and they have to be unemotional, etc. 

Being in favor of something because it nominally aligns with your personal identity rather than because it is the means that will logically lead to an end you favor is irrational… showing emotion or moral outrage or whatever is perfectly fine, but it is not a substitute for a logical means-to-ends discussion, and replacing logic with emotional identity politics significantly decreases the likelihood that your activity will result in the ends you seek.

(via clatterandclank)