11 Comments

Rob,

I find that people of the left's "agreeableness" suddenly seems to leave them when confronted by anything even mildly conservative.

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Women/ female academics seem to have a lot to answer for during this tumultuous period - almost makes one wish they never got the vote - and I am a woman : )

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Companies have long used variations of the big five personality assessment as one indicator of job and culture fit , when interviewing job candidates. Perhaps universities could do the same and at least be intentional about what kind of culture in campus they are striving for.

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Yeah, that's pretty depressing. I don't know how we fix the situation but I agree that we can't give up on universities. They have to be fixed.

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Reminds me tangentially of Duarte et al.’s 2015 paper on the importance of political diversity in social psychology. A field consisting of homogenous viewpoints is unlikely to be aware of its intellectual blind spots and risks devolving into unaccountable groupthink. Sadly, this seems to be descriptive of higher education in general at the moment, at least in the United States.

https://jsis.washington.edu/global/wp-content/uploads/sites/17/2019/07/political_diversity_will_improve_social_psychological_science_1.pdf

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There is a significant confounding factor in the data from the study. Women, especially liberal women, are typically very high in trait agreeableness. The study would probably have needed a bigger sample size to see how big a factor agreeableness is vs. male/female.

Similarly trait conscientious is much higher, on average, in men. So, how these findings break down in men with fairly low consciousness would be interesting.

Also, it would be interesting to see how things break out when respondents are ranked by the “middling 10” personality traits.

For instance, consciousness has orderliness and hard work components. I wonder if one vs. the other would swing a finding.

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"A little-understood backlash"

This kind of sums itself up, doesn't it?

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