Ideological diversity, hostility, and discrimination in philosophy

Members of the field of philosophy have, just as other people, political convictions or, as psychologists call them, ideologies. How are different ideologies distributed and perceived in the field? Using the familiar distinction between the political left and right, we surveyed an international sample of 794 subjects in philosophy. We found that survey participants clearly leaned left (75%), while right-leaning individuals (14%) and moderates (11%) were underrepresented. Moreover, and strikingly, across the political spectrum, from very left-leaning individuals and moderates to very right-leaning individuals, participants reported experiencing ideological hostility in the field, occasionally even from those from their own side of the political spectrum. Finally, while about half of the subjects believed that discrimination against left- or right-leaning individuals in the field is not justified, a significant minority displayed an explicit willingness to discriminate against colleagues with the opposite ideology. Our findings are both surprising and important, because a commitment to tolerance and equality is widespread in philosophy, and there is reason to think that ideological similarity, hostility, and discrimination undermine reliable belief formation in many areas of the discipline

Beware ‘persuasive communication devices’ when writing and reading scientific articles

Authors rely on a range of devices and techniques to attract and maintain the interest of readers, and to convince them of the merits of the author’s point of view. However, when writing a scientific article, authors must use these ‘persuasive communication devices’ carefully. In particular, they must be explicit about the limitations of their work, avoid obfuscation, and resist the temptation to oversell their results. Here we discuss a list of persuasive communication devices and we encourage authors, as well as reviewers and editors, to think carefully about their use

The relationship between teacher perceptions of pupil attractiveness and academic ability.

There is an established literature that suggests teacher perceptions of pupils affect how they interact with them, how they teach them and how they rate their ability and behaviour. Evidence also indicates that a teacher’s perception of a child is often based on ascriptive characteristics such as gender, ethnicity and socio-economic background independent of a child’s ability. This paper builds on the literature by examining the relationship between teacher perceptions of a child’s ability and behaviour and their perceptions of a particular ascriptive characteristic of those children - their attractiveness. Using data from the National Child Development Study (NCDS) results show that not only do teachers rate the academic ability of pupils they perceive to be attractive more highly than less attractive students both in terms of their performance across different areas of learning (general knowledge, numbers, books and oral ability) and whether they show any outstanding potential but they are also more likely to over rate and less likely to under rate their ability than other students. This is true even after controlling for a wide range of other factors related to the child, their family, their teacher and their school that could influence the relationship, many of which are shown to be independently related to teacher’s ratings

Who Believes in Me? The Effect of Student-Teacher Demographic Match on Teacher Expectations

Teachers are an important source of information for traditionally disadvantaged students. However, little is known about how teachers form expectations and whether they are systematically biased. We investigate whether student-teacher demographic mismatch affects high school teachers’ expectations for students’ educational attainment. Using a student fixed effects strategy that exploits expectations data from two teachers per student, we find that non-black teachers of black students have significantly lower expectations than do black teachers. These effects are larger for black male students and math teachers. Our findings add to a growing literature on the role of limited information in perpetuating educational attainment gaps

Perceptual Skill And Social Structure

Visual perception relies on stored information and environmental associations to arrive at a determinate representation of the world. This opens up the disturbing possibility that our visual experiences could themselves be subject to a kind of racial bias, simply in virtue of accurately encoding previously encountered environmental regularities. This possibility raises the following question: what, if anything, is wrong with beliefs grounded upon these prejudicial experiences? They are consistent with a range of epistemic norms, including evidentialist and reliabilist standards for justification. I argue that we will struggle to locate a flaw with these sorts of perceptual beliefs so long as we focus our analysis at the level of the individual and her response to information. We should instead broaden our analysis to include the social structure within which the individual is located. Doing so lets us identify a problem with the way in which unjust social structures in particular “gerrymander” the regularities an individual is exposed to, and by extension the priors their visual system draws on. I argue that in this way, social structures can cap perceptual skill

Self-fulfilling prophecies: a theoretical and integrative review

Self-fulfilling prophecies have become a major area of research for social, personality, developmental, and educational psychologists. This article reviews classroom self-fulfilling prophecies in terms of three sequential stages: (a) Teachers develop expectations, (b) teachers treat students differently depending on their expectations, and (c) students react to this treatment in expectancy-confirming ways. The focus of the review is on the social and psychological events occurring at each of these stages, the causal processes linking one stage to the next, and the conditions limiting the occurrence of self-fulfilling prophecies. Finally, it provides a theoretical framework for both understanding past research and guiding future research on self-fulfilling prophecies. This article presents a model of the social and psychological processes underlying self-fulfilling prophecies in the classroom. In general, the concept of self-fulfilling prophecy refers to situations in which one person's expectations about a second person lead the second person to act in ways that confirm the first person's original expectation. When applied to classrooms, the self-fulfilling prophecy refers to situations in which a teacher'