506. The Insanity of Woke Psychologists | Lee Jussim

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - Episode 506: "The Insanity of Woke Psychologists" | Lee Jussim

Release Date: December 16, 2024

---

Introduction

In Episode 506 of The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson engages in a compelling conversation with Lee Jussim, a distinguished Professor of Psychology at Rutgers University. The discussion delves deep into the current turmoil within the field of social psychology, examining the rise of left-wing authoritarianism, the efficacy of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives, and the pervasive culture of cancellation within academia.

Background on Lee Jussim

Lee Jussim is renowned for his critical stance on prevailing trends in social psychology. Having chaired both the Psychology and Anthropology departments at Rutgers, Jussim brings a wealth of experience and controversial insights to the conversation. Peterson highlights Jussim's unique position as one of the few social psychologists who rigorously adheres to scientific inquiry amidst widespread misinformation within the field.

Jordan Peterson [00:14]: "Lee is one of the rarer social psychologists who's actually a scientist, and he's done a lot of interesting and also controversial work."

Defining Left-Wing Authoritarianism

The core of their discussion centers on the concept of left-wing authoritarianism (LWA). Jussim elucidates the challenges in measuring authoritarianism across political spectrums, emphasizing that traditional scales have predominantly focused on right-wing authoritarianism (RWA).

Lee Jussim [04:34]: "Have some beliefs for that."

Peterson and Jussim explore the historical denial of LWA within social psychology, noting its official recognition only around 2016. This oversight, Jussim asserts, has significant implications for understanding bias and perception in contemporary societal structures.

Jordan Peterson [12:10]: "Social psychologists, the biggest social movements of the 20th, the biggest pathological social movements of the 20th century had their existence denied for 70 years."

Impact and Measurement of Authoritarianism

Jussim discusses his methodology in distinguishing between liberal and authoritarian left-wing ideologies. By utilizing political cartoons and memes, Jussim's studies reveal a strong correlation between LWA and the endorsement of divisive propaganda.

Lee Jussim [14:24]: "American liberty called Marxist troll."

Peterson suggests leveraging advanced tools like large language models to enhance the reliability and validity of authoritarianism scales, potentially revolutionizing psychological research methodologies.

Jordan Peterson [16:16]: "You can use ChatGPT to purify the questionnaires and you can do that on the left and on the right and you can... It takes like 10 minutes instead of two years."

DEI Initiatives and Their Psychological Impacts

A significant portion of the podcast is dedicated to evaluating the effectiveness of DEI programs. Jussim presents empirical evidence suggesting that certain DEI rhetoric may inadvertently exacerbate biases rather than mitigate them. Through controlled studies, he demonstrates that exposure to anti-racist and anti-Islamophobia materials can heighten perceptions of bias in otherwise neutral scenarios.

Lee Jussim [24:36]: "You have to see that there are associations of ideas."

Peterson draws parallels between DEI interventions and suicide prevention programs, cautioning that well-intentioned initiatives can sometimes lead to unintended negative consequences.

Jordan Peterson [21:33]: "You're advertising and normalizing suicide. Right."

The Culture War and Cancel Culture in Academia

The conversation shifts to the broader cultural conflict, with Jussim recounting his personal experiences of being targeted by academic cancel culture. He narrates the backlash following his critique of progressive diversity rhetoric, detailing the orchestrated efforts to brand him and his colleagues as racists.

Lee Jussim [60:05]: "Yeah, I was explicit in part of the denunciation."

Peterson and Jussim dissect the mechanics of cancellation, emphasizing how it leverages social media to orchestrate mass denunciations with minimal personal risk to the accusers.

Jordan Peterson [75:04]: "This is not good. It's like denunciation firestorm time."

Strategies to Counteract Cancellation Attempts

Jussim shares his strategies for navigating and surviving cancellation attempts. His approach advocates for silence during the initial phase of attacks, activating support networks, and methodically documenting all interactions to defend against unfounded accusations.

Lee Jussim [93:40]: "Go silent. Do not engage with your attackers."

Peterson complements this by advising maintaining composure, seeking truth over revenge, and leveraging ally support to withstand the onslaught of cancel culture.

Jordan Peterson [94:29]: "Don't panic. Don't assume. Be successful."

Conclusion and Future Directions

The episode concludes with a mutual understanding of the detrimental effects of unchecked authoritarianism and cancel culture within academic and broader societal contexts. Both Peterson and Jussim advocate for robust scientific inquiry, intellectual diversity, and resilience against ideological conformity to preserve the integrity of psychological research and academic freedom.

Jordan Peterson [89:22]: "If you're in serious social peril, there's two outcomes... Something positive lurking here."

Lee Jussim [99:54]: "I wouldn't wish it on anyone. In hindsight, it has made me a better person."

Key Takeaways

• Recognition of Left-Wing Authoritarianism: Jussim underscores the necessity of acknowledging and studying LWA to comprehend its role in shaping societal biases.

• Critique of DEI Programs: Empirical evidence suggests that certain DEI initiatives may reinforce biases, questioning their overall efficacy.

• Mechanics of Cancel Culture: The podcast highlights how cancel culture operates, the strategies to combat it, and its profound impact on academic freedom.

• Strategic Resilience: Adopting non-reactive strategies, building support networks, and documenting attacks are crucial for individuals facing unwarranted denunciations.

• Advocacy for Intellectual Diversity: Emphasizing the importance of diverse ideological perspectives within academia to foster a more balanced and credible scientific community.

---

This episode serves as a critical examination of the evolving landscape of social psychology and academia, urging listeners to reconsider prevailing narratives and advocate for a more evidence-based approach to understanding human behavior and societal structures.

Transcript

[Jordan Peterson]

So the podcast today took a turn back to the psychological, which is an improvement over the political as far as I'm concerned, generally speaking, likely because the topic of concentration has more long lasting significance, all things considered. So in any case, I spoke today with Lee Jussom, and Lee is the distinguished distinguished professor of Psychology at Rutgers, and he's been the chair there of the department of Psychology and separately of anthropology, which is a peculiar habit stance that we discuss in the podcast. I was interested in Lee's work because there's a lot of trouble in the field of social psychology. A lot of the claims of the field are not true. Now you gotta expect that in scientific inquiry because a lot of the things we believe are false. And the whole reason that we practice as scientists is to correct those falsehoods. And it's also the case that much of what's published is not going to be true because the alternative would be that everything that was published was a discovery that was true, and we'd be overwhelmed by novelty so fast that it would be untenable if that ever happened. Lee is one of the rarer social psychologists who's actually a scientist, and he's done a lot of interesting and also controversial work. That's partly how you can tell it's interesting and valid because it also is. Is controversial. One of the things he's established, which is of cardinal importance, is that our perceptions of other people are not mostly biased. Right? This is the contrary claim is rather preposterous, which is that all of the categories that we use to structure our interactions with other people are based on the power distortion of our perceptions, let's say, which is essentially a Marxist and postmodern claim. And Lee became infamous, at least in part because he showed that our perceptions, our stereotypes, if you will, are mostly accurate. There are sources of bias and they do enter into the process and they're relevant. But that's a very different claim than that the foundations of our perceptions themselves are indistinguishable from the biases we hold as motivated agents. And so his work is extremely important. It's core to the culture war that is tearing us apart. So if you're interested in the definition of perception, the relationship between perception and reality, and the analysis of bias in a manner that's credible, then pay attention to this podcast and get things cleared up. So I guess we might as well get right to the point. And the first thing I'm curious about is, and this is something I think that can be like fairly definitively laid at the Feet of social psychologists was that there was an absolute denial that anything like left wing authoritarianism existed, even conceptually, literally until 2016.

[Lee Jussim]

Yeah, that's right. It was like for 60 years I.

[Jordan Peterson]

Came across that and I thought, what do you mean? There's no such thing as left wing authoritarianism.

[Lee Jussim]

We know there.

[Jordan Peterson]

It's like, that's insane.

[Lee Jussim]

It's insane. It's insane. It's insane.

[Jordan Peterson]

And then there were a couple of papers published in 2016 on left wing authoritarianism in the Soviet Union. That was the first breaking of that. Damn. I did a master's. I supervised a master's thesis at that time. It's a very good thesis on left wing authoritarianism. And because we showed that there were statistical clumps of reliably characterizable left wing authoritarian beliefs that did in fact associate statistically and that identifiable groups of people with identifiable temperamental proclivities did hold. I really wanted to follow up on that because it was very rich, potential source of new information. But my academic career exploded at that point. It became impossible.

[Lee Jussim]

So people have taken that. Have taken. Taking that ball and run with it. Yeah, yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

So, well, tell us about it. What have you found? Well, okay, how do you. Let's start with some definitions like what constitutes left wing as opposed to right wing authoritarianism, let's say.

[Lee Jussim]

Right. So there are measurement issues across the board, but that is with respect to both left and right wing authoritarianism. There are questionnaires, commonly used questionnaires to assess right wing authoritarianism and to assess left wing authoritarianism. They're different. The reason. Let me give a little context. For a long time, people tried to develop nonpartisan authoritarianism scale. Authoritarianism was a psychological construction rather than a political one.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right.

[Lee Jussim]

And then they couldn't really do it because one of the core toxic elements of authoritarianism is a motivation to crush, deprive of humanity and human rights one's political opponents. So you need to assess either right or left wing authoritarianism vis a vis the attitudes towards one's opponents in order to measure the construction.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, so that's the. Okay, that's a very interesting. That's a very interesting definition though, because you're pointing to the fact that arguably, and tell me if you think this is right, the core of authoritarianism, which as you said can't be measured outside the political, isn't precisely political. It's your attitude towards those who don't agree with you.

[Lee Jussim]

Yes, it is, but you have to.

[Jordan Peterson]

Have some beliefs for that.

[Lee Jussim]

I didn't say can't I say they have not succeeded. Actually, one of my current graduate students is for her master's thesis in the process of trying to develop a nonpartisan authoritarianism.

[Jordan Peterson]

Based on that idea?

[Lee Jussim]

Yes, based on that idea. I don't know. I'm thinking about that clinically.

[Jordan Peterson]

It's like. Well, that's where you'd start to look at overlap between cluster B, personality, psychopathology, narcissism, borderline personality disorder, histrionic. Because those are the people who are very likely to elevate their own status at the cost of other people, including their children and those they purport to love.

[Lee Jussim]

So the first step to do that is to develop scales that adequate survey questions that adequately get at left or right wing authoritarianism and then correlate them with things measuring narcissism or sadism or whatever. People have done that on the left. And it does correlate with left wing authoritarianism. I don't know. You know, you never know for sure the limits of your own knowledge. So I don't know if anyone has even tried to do this on the right or maybe they have and it doesn't actually correspond with narcissism on the right. You have, it corresponds with other things on the right, but not so much with if there's evidence on narcissism correlating with right wing authoritarianism. I don't know.

[Jordan Peterson]

It's nothing at the moment comes to mind. I have a memory of a memory of something associated with that because I've tried to follow the literature, but I've definitely seen it emerge on the left. Correlations on the right. Well, from what I remember, and I'm vague about this because I can't give you sources, is that dark tetrad traits stand out quite markedly as associated with authoritarianism. And I thought that was somewhat independent of whether it was left or right. But I can't provide the sources out there and I review them in this new book I wrote on we who Wrestle with God. There's a lot of reference to the dark tetrad personality constellations and the political manifestations. But. Okay, but you've been studying it. Okay, so when we looked at the way we developed our measure, because I'd like to know how you developed yours, is we took, we took a very large sample of political opinions and then factor analyzed them to find out if we could identify first clumps of left wing and clumps of right wing belief, which you can clearly identify, and then to look within the left wing constellation to see if there is a Reliable subcategory of clearly authoritarian proclivities. And we found, you know, we found the biggest predictor of left wing authoritarianism was low I, low verbal IQ. It was a walloping predictor, negative 0.40. Immense predictor. So that's something to. Because one of the things we talked about at the beginning of the podcast was that some of these ideas sound good in the absence of further critical evaluation. So then you might say, well, if you lack the capacity for deep verbal critical evaluation, what apparently moral ideas would appeal to you. And, well, you could imagine that there might be a set of them, and one of them would be, well, don't be mean to people who aren't like you. Which is a perfectly good rule of thumb. Yes, but that doesn't mean it's the. It doesn't mean that everyone who says that's what they're for are in fact agitating on behalf of the principal.

[Lee Jussim]

Absolutely.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, so back to your research.

[Lee Jussim]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So first of all, let me be clear. Other than my student Sonia, who is trying to develop a nonpartisan authoritarianism scale, the work that we have done using either left wing or right wing authoritarianism scales are scales developed by other people. We haven't developed the scales.

[Jordan Peterson]

So for left wing, and then do you think there are good scales now for left and right wing authoritarianism? Adequate scales?

[Lee Jussim]

Adequate for right? Yes. And pretty good for left. Even though the research on left is much more recent.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right. Right.

[Lee Jussim]

You might think it would be therefore less well established. There's two teams, one led by Luke Conway and a different one led by Tom Costello, have done a lot of very good, both psychometric, sort of statistical assessment of how things hang together and also validity assessment of their two slightly different, somewhat different scales.

[Jordan Peterson]

You can tell if someone's belief is part of a set of identifiable beliefs. If they hold that belief. The fact they hold that belief predicts reliably that they hold another belief. Right. And then you want to see a pattern like that emerge across a lot of people. Then you see that there are associations of ideas. Right. Those would be something like the manifestation of an ideology. You want to see if that's identifiable, what its boundaries are, that it can be distinguished from other clumps of ideas. So left could be distinguished from right. This can all be done statistically and very reliably.

[Lee Jussim]

Yeah, Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

Now, it wasn't done by social psychologists from the end of World War II till 2016. Right. Shameful. Lacuna in the history of political analysis within the psychological community. It shocked Me, when I first discovered it.

[Lee Jussim]

Me too. Me too.

[Jordan Peterson]

It was shocking. Really.

[Lee Jussim]

Talk about blind spots. Oh my God.

[Jordan Peterson]

It's like, oh, do you guys miss Mao and Styles?

[Lee Jussim]

I know, right?

[Jordan Peterson]

How do you miss that? How do you miss that? Fairly obvious.

[Lee Jussim]

And then they were denied.

[Jordan Peterson]

Social, Social psychologists, the biggest social movements of the 20th, the biggest pathological social movements of the 20th century had their existence denied for 70 years.

[Lee Jussim]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

Mind boggling.

[Lee Jussim]

It's mind boggling.

[Jordan Peterson]

It's minds. It just. I've never recovered from discovery.

[Lee Jussim]

Yes.

[Jordan Peterson]

It took me like a year to even believe it was true. Okay, so you're using other people's questions. Yes. So what, what's your approach? How are you?

[Lee Jussim]

Well, it does depend on the study. So this is one good one that I think I can describe. Shortly, quickly. We administered cartoons, like political cartoons, as if they were memes, like social media memes, to an online sample, about a thousand people and asked them how much they liked the cartoons and memes and which. And we told them to vote for the one for their favorite because the one that received the most votes we would actually post on social media. Now that was a lie. It was deception. And we explained that at the end. But we wanted them to believe that when they were selecting something that this was as close as we get to a behavior. It was close to them posting it. They believed their vote could influence what we posted. So it's real world outcome, a real world quasi behavioral would be promoted rather than just like liking or disliking.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right, okay. Or self report that they believe something.

[Lee Jussim]

That's right. So two of the. I'm going to describe two of the cartoons which were quite a contrast to each other. We actually had a set kind of like the first and a set like the second. But I can describe the two quickly enough. The first was actually a political propaganda cartoon from the Soviet Union. We didn't tell them that. From the 1930s, 1940s, anti American propaganda. But we didn't tell them that. We just presented the cartoon which showed a long distance shot of this. In the top panel was a long distance shot of the Statue of Liberty. The bottom panel was a close up of her head and her crown and the spires of the crown were KKK members, People dressed in kkk, Whatever.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right, right, right. So the true nature of American liberty.

[Lee Jussim]

American liberty called Marxist troll. Yes, right. Okay, that was one. And then the second was an image of a diverse group of people. People, different racial and ethnic groups, wearing clothes for different professions. Might be a bus driver or a businessman. Or a secretary or a teacher or whatever. There were a whole bunch of different kinds of people in obviously different roles, kind of in a crowd with their arms around each other under an American flag. Sort of pluralistic diversity. That's kind of humanistic form of diversity. And then we simply ask people, you know, we ask them, which ones do you like the most? Which ones do you want to share on social media? And so was that a benevolent left.

[Jordan Peterson]

View and a sort of left view?

[Lee Jussim]

Yes, exactly. Right, right, that's right. Demonizing America versus We did find in.

[Jordan Peterson]

Our analysis that there were. There's a liberal left, that's. That's clear. And there's a authoritarian left and the liberal left, this is part of our investigation. The liberal left isn't. How did we figure that out? The liberal left doesn't partake of the attitudes of the radical authoritarian leftists. But they're the ones that. I also think that they're sort of oblivious. Denies. Yeah, they're oblivious.

[Lee Jussim]

Yes, I think that's true. And that is what we found. That's what we found in the study.

[Jordan Peterson]

I got a research. I. Yes, that's relevant to this. Well, with regards to these questionnaires, it's something that I wanted to do. You know, the large language models track statistical probability. So you can take those left wing questionnaire sets and you can ask ChatGPT, here's an item or here's three items, generate 30 more and it does it.

[Lee Jussim]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right. So if you wanted to improve the statistical reliability of the measures, so you can imagine, take the measures that already exist, put them in clumps of 3 in ChatGPT, have it expanded out to like 300 items, administer it to a thousand people and distill it. Because the thing.

[Lee Jussim]

That's a great idea.

[Jordan Peterson]

This will speed things up radically because the thing about the large language models is they already have the statistical correlations built in. When you ask ChatGPT to generate 40 items that are conceptually like these four, that's what it does. It's not an opinion. So you can use ChatGPT to purify the questionnaires and you can do that on the left and on the right and you can. It takes like 10 minutes instead of two years.

[Lee Jussim]

I'm going to bring this back to Sonya. This is great.

[Jordan Peterson]

So that.

[Lee Jussim]

And tell me Sonia's a fan of your podcast. I'm sure she's going to see this. I'll probably talk to her before, but. Hi, Sonia.

[Jordan Peterson]

I should be doing all the questionnaires. Like it's the same with narcissism. See, the other thing you could do with ChatGPT is you could say here's 20 items significant of narcissism. Okay. Which is the central item. And can you generate 20 items that are better markers of that central tendency? And the thing is, it can do it because it's mapped the linguistic representations so all the factor structures already built into the ChatGPT systems, like all of it.

[Lee Jussim]

That's great.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah. So, okay, so this is one of the things I would pursue if I still had a research lab. Right. These things are hard to pursue without having that infrastructure in place. But I think this would radically speed up the.

[Lee Jussim]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

Radically speed up the process of.

[Lee Jussim]

I totally.

[Jordan Peterson]

And also make it much more reliable and valid.

[Lee Jussim]

Yeah, right. So I think that's right.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, yeah.

[Lee Jussim]

Okay, well, we'll have to try it. We'll have to try it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

Try it out. Okay.

[Lee Jussim]

Absolutely.

[Jordan Peterson]

All right. So back to yeah, yeah. All right. So now you've got people voting for one comic or the other. Yes.

[Lee Jussim]

And it was exactly as you described before. We went down the large language model path that liberals who are not. So we use statistical regression. We can separate out being liberal but not authoritarian from being a left wing authoritarian but not liberal. Liberalism predicted endorsement of the sort of humanistic diversity image, the people together under an American flag. We're all different, but we're all in it together. We love America, blah, blah, blah.

[Advertisement Speaker]

When we think about wildly successful businesses, we often focus on their great products, cool branding and brilliant marketing. But there's an unsung hero in their success stories. The business behind the business that makes selling simple for millions of entrepreneurs, that business is Shopify. Shopify is home to the number one checkout on the planet. And here's the not so secret secret. With shop pay, they boost conversions up to 50%. That means fewer abandoned carts and more completed sales. Our marketing team uses Shopify every day to sell our merchandise. And we love how easy it is to add more items, ship products, and track conversions. In today's market, growth minded businesses need a commerce solution that's just as flexible and dynamic as they are. Whether your customers are browsing your website, scrolling through social media, or wandering into your store, Shopify ensures you're ready to sell, ready to elevate your business. Upgrade your business today and get the same checkout daily wire uses. Sign up for your $1 per month trial period at shopify.comjbp all lowercase go to shopify.comjbp today to upgrade your selling. That's shopify.comjbp.

[Lee Jussim]

It was left wing authoritarianism, powerfully predicted endorsement of the Soviet propaganda. The, the, the Statue of Liberty is kkk.

[Jordan Peterson]

And so the questionnaires predicted that.

[Lee Jussim]

Yes, yes.

[Jordan Peterson]

Oh, that's good. That's good.

[Lee Jussim]

Yeah, yeah, it was, it was. It's a great study.

[Jordan Peterson]

So another thing you might want to do is take that questionnaire, do an item analysis with regards to preference and rank. Order the items in terms of their predictive validity in relationship to the cartoon because you might be able to see which of the items are central.

[Lee Jussim]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

Especially if you saw that pattern across multiple cartoons.

[Lee Jussim]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay. Okay, okay.

[Lee Jussim]

Yeah. So that's one. That's. Yeah, yeah, we did this kind of thing.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah. Well, how many studies have you done now on left wing authoritarianism?

[Lee Jussim]

Well, it's a lot. I mean, it's a lot and we include it in almost everything. And we include measures of left and right wing authoritarianism in most of the studies we've been conducting.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right, right, right.

[Lee Jussim]

So.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, so tell us more.

[Lee Jussim]

Okay, so the most recent splash, and I think that's what got your staff member interested in having me on here, were three experimental studies assessing the psychological impacts of common DEI rhetoric and headache.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right, right.

[Lee Jussim]

And we did it with three types of. Three different kinds of dei.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, those are probably studies that I'd run across of years. I remember that.

[Lee Jussim]

Yeah, that's. Well, this is fairly recent and they've made more of a splash than I would have expected.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, it's one thing to say that DEI programs work, it's another thing to say they don't work. And it's a completely different thing to say they do the opposite of what. Yeah, yes, that's not good. And it seems to me highly probable.

[Lee Jussim]

So little.

[Jordan Peterson]

Suicide prevention programs, the kind the government's always running, they make suicide rates go up. Well, because. Why? Well, you're advertising and normalizing suicide. Right. And you think, well, we're going to put up a prevention program. It's like, first, are you clinically trained? Second, did you do the research? Third, did you ever stop to consider that your conceptualization of the problem might be inadequate in relationship to its solution? There's so many things, things like this that happen. Clinicians have become the research oriented, clinicians have become very, very sensitive to such things because it's frequently the case that a well meaning intervention will make things worse.

[Lee Jussim]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

Then you might ask why. It's like, well, there's 50,000 ways something could be worse, and like one way it could be better. And so just. It's an overwhelmingly high probability that whatever you do to change something that works makes it worse. Right. Okay, so now so do you. What was your evidence that the DEI interventions made what was made worse? What interventions? And what was your evidence linking them?

[Lee Jussim]

Yes. Okay, so let me walk through. Let me qualify this a little bit. We examined the rhetoric that is common to many DEI interventions.

[Jordan Peterson]

ChatGPT can do a very good job of that, by the way.

[Lee Jussim]

Kind of the problem is a lot of the materials used in DEI trainings aren't publicly available. So it's actually hard. And we can say they're common to things we had access to, but we don't. A lot is not publicly available. And that's an important limitation. Well, hold on. That's an important limitation that your listeners. Viewers should understand. It's not like we evaluated the effectiveness of the DEI training program instituted by the HR department of the City of Milwaukee. We didn't do that. We took the intellectual ideas from three different kinds of sources. Anti racism rhetoric, anti Islamophobia rhetoric, and anti caste. The Hindu caste system, anti caste oppression rhetoric. And there are. Well, for race. We used passages from Kendi's how to Be an Anti racist and from D'Angelo's white fragility. These books were widely required throughout colleges. There's sometimes she is paid $40,000 a session to come in and give her training. So we also actually used this sort of large language model, language network analysis to examine the extent to which this type of rhetoric was common throughout the training materials we had access to. And it was very common.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, okay. Okay, fine. To use that as a validation.

[Lee Jussim]

You know what I have. So just. So I have this here. So let me give an example from, from the race. And this is just a short excerpt so people would read. So they would read, say an anti racist passage or a control passage. The control passage in these studies, in two out of the three, was about how to grow corn on the farm. It was completely separate. And this is only a short excerpt of a longer passage.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, okay.

[Lee Jussim]

White people. This is the anti racism. White people raised in Western society are conditioned into a white supremacist worldview. Racism is the norm. It is not unusual. This went on for a full paragraph and it was quotes smoothed together with a little writing by us of Kendi and D'Angelo. Yeah, okay. All right. So they then were presented with a very brief scenario in which a college admissions officer interviews an applicant and Ultimately, the applicant is rejected from admission. That's the whole scenario. I mean, the words are slightly different because I'm doing that piece from memory, but that's basically the whole scenario. They were then asked a series of questions assessing how much perceived racism and bias was.

[Jordan Peterson]

Was the causal factor.

[Lee Jussim]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. On the part of the admissions officer. Okay. And what we found is when they got the Kendi Diangelo essay, they claimed to have seen or observed the admissions officer committing more microaggressions, treating the applicant more unfairly, and that the admissions officer was more biased.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay. So I'm going to put on my devil's advocate hat and I'm going to play Robin D'Angelo, despite wearing this Trump badge. And I'm going to say, well, the effects of institutional racism are so pervasive that they even invaded your experimental material. And the consequence of being exposed to the contents of my writing, speaking as Robin D'Angelo, was that the scales fell from the eyes of your experimental subjects and they were able to perceive the racism that we claimed was there in a manner they couldn't before.

[Lee Jussim]

Yes, that is probably what D'Angelo would say. Actually, I can tell you a little bit what Kendi did say because he was asked about it. He did not say that. If someone said that, I would say, well, in our scenario, none of that was evident. You had to read that into the scenario. And that is the point. That.

[Jordan Peterson]

How do you know that your own implicit bias didn't stop you from seeing the bias that was there?

[Lee Jussim]

Because anyone can look at the scenario. People didn't even have racial information about the admissions officer and the applicant. So.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, so you regard it as highly improbable that what they were reading into the situation, that what they were you regarded as highly probable that they were reading into the situation. Okay, let me ask you a couple more technical questions. Okay. How much of this material were they exposed to before they did the evaluation?

[Lee Jussim]

About a paragraph.

[Jordan Peterson]

Oh, just a paragraph. Just how soon before the evaluation?

[Lee Jussim]

Pretty soon.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay. Do you have any idea what the lag time like if you did a dose response study, so to speak, is there a decay? Like, how permanent are the effects? I know I couldn't expect you to do all that in one study, but it's germane, right?

[Lee Jussim]

Well, it is kind of. So on the narrow issue of how long do the effects we observed in this study last? We didn't study that. So I have no answer to that.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, of course.

[Lee Jussim]

Okay. But given that we observed the effects that we did, the sort of People concocting racism where there was no evidence of it on the basis of a very minor intervention. That's like reading a single paragraph. It at least raises the possibility that when people are in a culture or organizational context in which this type of rhetoric is pervasive, that they are constantly being exposed or primed to think about race in these terms. And because of the steady diet of this kind of rhetoric, the effects are likely to be more enduring than anything we could possibly observe.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right, right. Fair enough. Well, I would also say probably you evaluated some of the weaker systemic effects of that kind of rhetoric, because it isn't merely exposure to the rhetoric. It's the fact that post hoc detection of such things as microaggressions, let's say, are radically rewarded by the participants in those ideological systems.

[Lee Jussim]

Absolutely.

[Jordan Peterson]

That'd be an even more. Yes, that's a more powerful effect. So you got it with weak exposure, fundamentally. Okay, so.

[Lee Jussim]

Right. And no reward. Right. I mean, you're speaking to the social reward. Exactly. Yes.

[Jordan Peterson]

So I would say the weakness of your intervention demonstrated the power of the rhetoric.

[Lee Jussim]

Okay.

[Jordan Peterson]

What did Kendi have to say about this?

[Lee Jussim]

He described us as racist pseudoscientists.

[Jordan Peterson]

Oh, yeah.

[Lee Jussim]

Oh, yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay. Well, that pretty much covers the territory. Did he say why, or was that unnecessary?

[Lee Jussim]

You know, how are you at wasting money?

[Jordan Peterson]

My sense is that he was particularly good at that. So, yeah. University money? Counterproductively.

[Lee Jussim]

Well, I think most of his was from actually. What's his name? Jack. Jack Dorsey from Twitter, I think. Gave him $10 million. So at least it wasn't state money.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right, yeah, right, right, right. Okay. Well, then you can just let it go. So. Okay, okay, okay. You said that produced quite a splash.

[Lee Jussim]

Yes.

[Jordan Peterson]

Including enhanced probability of being on this podcast, for example.

[Lee Jussim]

Yes.

[Jordan Peterson]

So I'd followed your work for a long time before coming across that. So what effect has it had? When was the study published, first of all?

[Lee Jussim]

Well, so.

[Jordan Peterson]

And is it a sequence? Is it a single study?

[Lee Jussim]

No, it's three studies. So it's essentially the same structure for an anti Islamophobia intervention and an anti caste oppression. And it's essentially the same results as little minor differences, but it's essentially the same pattern of results. They're not published. So these studies I conducted in collaboration with the ncri. NCRI is the Network Contagion Research Institute. They are a freestanding research institute that Maine started out mostly doing research along the lines of this sort of large language model stuff that you were talking about earlier. Analysis of social media and analysis of radicalism conspiracy theories, hate sort of groups and individuals mobilizing online. And they've done it with all sorts of stuff. They've done it with COVID conspiracies, they've done it with QAnon, they've done it with Islamophobia, they've done it with anti Hindu hate, they've done it with anti Semitism. They were the first group of any kind, as far as I know, in the summer of 2020, the height of the George Floyd social justice protests, which as you remember the rhetoric on the left, this is consistent with what you were talking about earlier about how the left isn't the reasonable left is in complete denial of the far left. It is literally true that most of the protests were peaceful. Whenever someone would present evidence of some protests not being peaceful at all, like firebombing a police station or capturing downtown Seattle or all sorts of setting by creating sort of setting the stage for lawlessness, you would have looting and robberies that weren't really part of the protest, but people were taking advantage of the sort of police free zones and stuff. When you would talk about that, the response was this is all just right.

[Jordan Peterson]

Wing, right wing, of course.

[Lee Jussim]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

Oh yeah. I talked to moderate Democrats who told me that antifa was a figment of the right wing imagination. I thought. But you know, there's something weird about that that's very much worth pointing out, I believe, is that we radically underestimate the effect a very small minority of people who are organized can have in destabilizing a society.

[Lee Jussim]

That's right.

[Jordan Peterson]

For example, in the flux of the aftermath of World War I, Russia was chaotic enough so that a very small minority of people that would be the Bolsheviks, destabilized and captured the entire country. So even if the true radicals on the left are 3%, say, well, 97% of them are peaceful, it's like, fair enough, but you're. Yes, you're suffering from the delusion that a demented minority is harmless.

[Advertisement Speaker]

Are you tired of feeling sluggish, rundown or just not your best self? Take control of your health and vitality today. With balance of nature. With balance of nature. There's never been a more convenient dietary supplement to ensure you get a wide variety of fruits and vegetables every day. Balance of nature takes fruits and vegetables, they freeze, dry them, turn them into a powder, and then they put them into a capsule. The capsules are completely void of additives, fillers, extracts, synthetics, pesticides or added sugar. The only thing in balance of nature, fruit and veggie Capsules are fruits and veggies. Right now you can order with promo code Jordan to get 35% off your first order, plus get a free bottle of fiber and spice. Experience balance of nature for yourself today. Go to balanceofnature.com and use promo code JORDAN for 35% off your first order as a preferred customer. Plus get a free bottle of fiber and spice. That's balanceofnature.com promo code JORDAN for 35 percent off your first preferred order, plus a free bottle of fiber and spice.

[Lee Jussim]

And that's seriously wrong. So this. Enter the NCRI. So in summer of 2020, when this was all the record, most of the protests, I peacefully complete denial mainstream media, that there was violence and bombings and all sorts of other stuff. The ncri, this is the first project I did with them, produces an analysis finding that the far left groups, not conventional liberals or Democrats, but these far left radical groups, were exploiting the earnest commitment to anti racism or the social justice on the part of people justifiably upset about George Floyd's murder and the implications about that for racism beyond that. But these far left groups were exploiting that to both gin up supporters and to mobilize online. This is all occurring on social media to capture protests, to ratchet up and inspire more aggressive violence at the protests.

[Jordan Peterson]

So this, that's exactly what you'd expect. Of course that's going to happen.

[Lee Jussim]

I'm not right.

[Jordan Peterson]

Clearly, if you believe in criminals.

[Lee Jussim]

Yeah, right, right, right. Okay. So and then an NCR would, in this report would then link the increased online activity. You know, there'd be memes like acab, all cops are bastards. You know, so there'd be things like that. And some of the groups were actually using social media to coordinate their, you know, the sort of violent protest activities. So live. I'm making this up. But it was this kind of thing. People would be, you know, at these protests on their phones. They would get instructions from some sort of central place that the cops were over here, so everybody needs to go over there. And that's how they would have. So they were getting tactical instructions live via social media in addition to sort of ginning up the rhetoric to garner support and adherence. Okay, so before they brought me on, maybe two or three months before, the NCRI had posted a report on how far right groups do essentially the same thing, sort of mobilize online using memes and catchphrases and garner adherence, gain adherence and stuff. So they bring me on, we do this thing and this paper on the far left which really looks to me, it looked to me like the far left groups were seeking to ignite an actual revolution.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, that is what they do.

[Lee Jussim]

I know, right, yes. This doesn't seem far fetched, right?

[Jordan Peterson]

They can dance in the ashes that way, right?

[Lee Jussim]

Yes, yeah, yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

The real criminal psychopaths, the short term guys, the narcissists, they thrive in chaos because their niche is chaos.

[Lee Jussim]

Yes. I was kind of new to that at the time, but in hindsight, yes, absolutely.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah. Well, it's a shocking thing to know.

[Lee Jussim]

The NCRI to no credit to me. I'm an academic, I'm a professor, I don't do this kind of thing. Had access to journalists at the New York Times and Washington Post who, who ran stories on this report. And it was the first time there was any acknowledgement in the mainstream media that there was any level of violence and danger in the protests. I felt really good about this was like September 2020. We did the work over the summer. The thing came. But that report is not published in a peer reviewed journal. NCRI has its own website and they published these reports, kind of like old times.

[Jordan Peterson]

And that's where your studies were? What?

[Lee Jussim]

Yes and no. So as of right now, that's where they are. They're available on the NCRI website.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, and who did that? Was it post doc, doctoral students?

[Lee Jussim]

It was a bunch of. Well, it was. So it was me, two of my grad students, although one of my, both of my grad students also work closely with the ncri. And then there were a series of analysts at the NCRI and including their head researcher. So a bunch of us are co authors on this. We have this. So I've not been working with them for several years and it took a while for us to get used to each other. You know, their strength is this online social media, large language model topic network stuff, you know, with an eye towards threats and conspiracy theories and hate. And my strength is conventional social science surveys.

[Jordan Peterson]

That's a nice overlap. It is, yeah, it's a nice.

[Lee Jussim]

We needed to figure out the best synergies. It took a while, but we have this rhythm.

[Jordan Peterson]

Why that approach with regards to the dissemination of this information, this particular experimental information rather than the more standard journal approach.

[Lee Jussim]

Yeah. So one of the things first, let me give context, a little more context. So our rhythm is first we post stuff essentially as a white paper, as a report on the NCRI site. It gets some attention, some public vetting, we get some feedback on it and then we scale it up for peer review.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, that's not unlike doing a preprint. It's like doing a prevention.

[Lee Jussim]

Yes. Okay, now it's a little different. It's different. It is like I have taken to calling it a homespun preprint and here is why I call it a homespun preprint. It's like a preprint in that it's a report of empirical studies that is posted online that haven't been peer reviewed. Yeah, it is unlike a conventional preprint in that it is per. And this is the answer to your question, why did we do it this way? Rather than.

[Jordan Peterson]

Wait for me.

[Lee Jussim]

This is part of the answer. It is. Even though some of it is highly technical, a lot of the worst of the technical stuff is stripped down so that it is comprehensible to the lay, intelligent audience. And that has a value in and of its own. Right. Because the problem with peer review is that it can. Easy. Well, there are many problems with peer review, especially now. You're right, there's many. Yeah. Right. Okay. But one of them is that it could take a year, two years. It's horrible.

[Jordan Peterson]

It's unforgivable.

[Lee Jussim]

Yeah, that's right.

[Jordan Peterson]

It needs to be. That whole system I've been thinking about.

[Lee Jussim]

Needs to be upended completely.

[Jordan Peterson]

It's like in this day and age, a two year leg to publication.

[Lee Jussim]

It's crazy.

[Jordan Peterson]

It's completely insane.

[Lee Jussim]

It's crazy. That's right.

[Jordan Peterson]

You spend 30% of your time writing grant applications that go nowhere and two years to lag to publication that almost no one is likely to.

[Lee Jussim]

That's right.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, that's right. How the hell have you not been canceled? Why is that? Because it's weird.

[Lee Jussim]

There have been repeat attempts to cancel me that have failed.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, well, so why don't you tell me and everybody else first of all why you're. What would you say? Why you so richly deserve canceling? That's the first. That's the first issue. And then the next issue, which is of equal importance, is how you've managed to not have that happen. Because that's actually really hard. So. Because if people try to cancel you, especially given the things that you've researched and have insisted upon and said, if people try to cancel you, there's an overwhelming probability in academia in particular that that will be successful. So let's start by talking about the sorts of things that you've been pointing to in. Well, in academia in general and then more specifically in psychology and social psychology.

[Lee Jussim]

Sure. There are probably too many of these attempts for me to go Through. So I'm going to pick one.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, Pick the cream of the crop.

[Lee Jussim]

Yeah, this is probably the cream of the crop. It is. I refer to. So I have a very active substack site, Unsafe Science, and I have several posts on this. You can find it under the Pops Fiasco, Racist Mule trope. There's a whole series on this. Okay, so what is Pops? Pops is Perspectives on Psych Science, one of the very prestigious journals within the field of psychology for publishing reviews and commentaries and the like. The short version is that I was invited by the editor to do a commentary on a main paper that was critical. The main paper by a psychologist named Hummel. Bernard Hummel, was critical of prior work in psychology advocating for diversity in a variety of ways. The nature of his critique was that much of the rhetoric in psychological scholarship around diversity was narrowly focused on, and the terms are constantly changing. Underrepresented, minority, minoritized, disadvantaged, oppressed groups. And that from a scientific intersectionally. Yeah, yeah, right. Exactly. That's right.

[Jordan Peterson]

Intersexually deprived.

[Lee Jussim]

And there was a recent article which argued that on scientific grounds, we need to do exactly that. Hummel's critique was. That was really multiple. But two of his key points were that, well, there are some types of things. It's irrelevant. Diversity is irrelevant for certain kind of theoretical, scientific tests. And then the other point is that if diversity matters, it matters for scientific purposes. It matters extremely broadly, and it's not restricted to underrepresented groups. And a very simple example would be if you would compare a study based on undergraduate psychology students versus one based on a nationally representative sample. The research based on the nationally representative sample is going to be broader and more generalizable and more credible. A nationally representative sample represents the population. It's not focused entirely on any subset of the population. That would be a very simple example of Hummel's point. I was asked to do a commentary. I did.

[Jordan Peterson]

And there's. Okay, There's a distinction there, too, that we should draw. Clearly, it's the case that if you want to draw generalizable conclusions about human beings from a study, that the study participants should be a randomly selected and representative sample of the population to whom you're attempting to generalize, obviously, because otherwise it doesn't generalize. That's very different than making the case that underrepresented groups should be preferentially hired or employed or promoted or completely different.

[Lee Jussim]

Completely different. Completely different.

[Jordan Peterson]

Just.

[Lee Jussim]

That was sort of part of Hummel's critique.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, yeah, but I guess so.

[Lee Jussim]

Again, the editor invited me to publish a commentary on this exchange, and the title of my commentary was Is it eventually got published, is Diversity is Diverse. Because there's lots of different kinds of diversity. And if we're arguing for diversity on scientific grounds, then what the science needs to be is fully representative of the. Whether it's the participants or the topics or it goes way beyond oppression. I mean, oppression is a part of that and shouldn't be excluded, but it's only one piece of that. So I basically was in agreement with Hummel's critique and augmented it. As part of that, I critiqued progressive academic rhetoric around diversity as disingenuous and hypocritical. And the way I framed that, the way I captured it, was using a quote from Fiddler on the Roof. So in Fiddler on the Roof, which is what an early 20th century Jewish life in the.

[Jordan Peterson]

One of the great movies of all.

[Lee Jussim]

Time, everyone should watch it. Probably its most famous song is Tradition, which is about the importance of tradition and keeping the community together. But then there were exceptions. So there's an interlude in the song Tradition where the. Whatever. The villagers get into an argument because one chimes in, there was the time he sold him a horse but delivered a mule. And I use that to frame my discussion of progressive disingenuousness around.

[Jordan Peterson]

They all disintegrate into fractions in the middle of this about unity to. When that comes out.

[Lee Jussim]

Yeah, when that comes out. That's right. That's right. And I argued in this paper that the way in the reason that's a good metaphor for progressive rhetoric around diversity is that diversity, superficially, it sounds good to a lot of people, because who doesn't want to be included, no matter what group you're a member of, the idea that someone is advocating for diversity, you know, it's kind of appealing. And so, for example, yes, with two.

[Jordan Peterson]

Seconds of thought, it's a positive thing.

[Lee Jussim]

Yes, with two seconds of thought, it's a positive thought.

[Jordan Peterson]

Or that people should be free of arbitrary exclusion.

[Lee Jussim]

Yeah, of arbitrary exclusion. That's right. That's right. And for example, one thing you might think, one might think if one had a little bit of knowledge, is that especially in the social sciences and humanities, but really in academia writ large, there's hardly anyone who is not left of center. I mean, the range goes from sort of center left to the far, far left. I have a former.

[Jordan Peterson]

That's very well documented.

[Lee Jussim]

It's very. I have a former.

[Jordan Peterson]

No one disagrees with that claim.

[Lee Jussim]

Well, so Nate Honeycutt, my former student, he's now a research scientist at FHIR in the foundation for Individual rights and Expression, did a dissertation on this, surveyed almost 2,000 faculty nationwide at the top colleges and universities and found that 40% self identified not just as on the left. The amount on the Left was about 90, 95%, but 40% self identified as radicals, activists, Marxists or socialists.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, 40%.

[Lee Jussim]

So this is the extreme left. This is no longer just like Democrats or liberals. This is nearly half on the far left.

[Jordan Peterson]

And that was a sample of how many people.

[Lee Jussim]

It was almost 2000. Yeah.

[Advertisement Speaker]

As Christmas approaches, there's a beautiful opportunity to keep God at the center of this season. Through Hallow, the number one prayer app, they're launching a special advent prayer challenge called For God so love the world that promises to be a transformative spiritual journey. This challenge features an incredible lineup of guides. Survivalist Bear Grylls and Jonathan. Ruins from the chosen will lead you through a severe mercy, A powerful story of faith and divine love. You'll join pastor Francis Chan and Jeff Cavins for profound scripture reflections while actor Kevin James explores the spiritual classic Divine Intimacy. The experience is enriched with beautiful Advent music from award winning artists including Gwen Stefani, Lauren Daigle and Matt Marr. It's more than just daily prayer. It's an invitation to experience God's love, mercy and healing in a deeper way. Don't wait. Get three months of Hallow [e-mail] Jordan make this a time of putting God at the center and experience the good that comes from it. That's Hallow.com Jordan for three months free.

[Jordan Peterson]

How many faculty members at colleges and universities do you suppose there are in the United States? Approximately? Do you have any idea?

[Lee Jussim]

I have looked into this. It's hundreds of thousands. I don't know the number.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay.

[Lee Jussim]

So I don't. I don't remember. I have looked into it.

[Jordan Peterson]

It's very large. So that means there's 80,000 academic activists who are being employed full time in the United States.

[Lee Jussim]

I don't know if you could go that far because he looked at the top colleges and universities. If you wanted to generalize to all colleges and universities, you would have to include community colleges and, you know, primarily liberal arts.

[Jordan Peterson]

Do you think they'd be. Do you think they'd be less, I don't know, biased? Okay. We don't know.

[Lee Jussim]

I don't know.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay. So it's not 80,000, but it could easily be 50,000.

[Lee Jussim]

Yes, yes, yes.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay. So that's a number I want to return to. Okay, okay.

[Lee Jussim]

Okay.

[Jordan Peterson]

Because there's implications.

[Lee Jussim]

So one might think, for if someone is advocating for diversity, given the extreme political skew and given the extent to which academia deals with politicized topics, that there would be an embrace of people, an attempt to bring into academia professors, researchers, scholars, teachers from across the political spectrum. That has never gotten any traction in academia. And in fact, it's gone in the complete opposite direction. If you go back 50, 60 years, I think it's fair to describe the way academia has functioned is to produce a slow moving purge of conservatives and even people center and libertarians from its ranks. So my point in this commentary was using things like that as examples of the disingenuousness of progressive rhetoric around diversity, that it wasn't really diversity in the broadest sense. It was a very narrow.

[Jordan Peterson]

See, that's actually the fundamental flaw of intersectionality is intersectionality devolves into combinatorial explosion almost immediately. Right. Because once you start combining the categories of oppression, you don't have to make. You don't have your list of combinations, black women, gay, et cetera. Every time you add another variable to that multiplicative list, you decrease the pool of people that occupy that list radically. Right, Right. But there's also an infinite. There's literally an indefinite. This is your point, an indefinite number of potentially relevant group categories.

[Lee Jussim]

Yes.

[Jordan Peterson]

So how in the world are you going to ensure that every possible combination of every possible group category is. You can't even measure it, much less insure it.

[Lee Jussim]

Yeah, you can't do that. Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

So there's this underlying insistence which you're pointing to, I believe, that there are privileged categories of oppressed people. Right. And, and it's a weird thing, right? It's like, why is it that it's race and sex? And you might think, well, those are the most obvious differences between people. And maybe you can make that case. But then it's also gender, which is a very weird insistence because whether the idea of gender is a valid. I don't think the idea of gender is a valid idea at all. I think it's super. It's. What would you say? It's a warped misconceptualization of everything that's captured by temperament. Much more accurately and precisely. We can talk about that. But also sexual orientation, I can't see at all why that would emerge as a privileged category of oppression alongside something like sex. Like it could, but it's not obvious why. Okay, so you're pointing some of. And then you said, well, there's important elements of diversity.

[Lee Jussim]

Yes, especially intellectually that's right.

[Jordan Peterson]

Like adequate distribution of political or ethical views across the spectrum. That's completely off the table.

[Lee Jussim]

Yeah, it's completely off the table. It's like rejected. It's worse than off the table. So that was my paper and there's more to the story than this. But to keep this succinct, eventually what happened was almost 1400 academics, probably mostly psychologists, signed an open letter denouncing. So my paper was one of several commentaries. All of the commentaries were critical of this oppression, framing of diversity.

[Jordan Peterson]

All of them?

[Lee Jussim]

All of them.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay. And this was in Pops?

[Lee Jussim]

It was in. Yeah. Perspectives on Psych Science.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, so I just want to provide people some background on this and correct me if I get any of this wrong. So scientists publish in research journals and they generally publish articles of two types. One type would be a research study, an actual experiment, let's say, or a sequence of experiments. And the other, I guess there's two other types. There's reviews and there's commentaries. And then there's a variety of different journals that scientists publish in. And some of those cover all scientific topics. Science and Nature, the world's premier scientific journals, used to do that before they became woke institutions. And then there are specialized journals that cover fields like psychology, and then there are subspecialized journals. And the less specialized the journal, All Things Considered, the more prestigious it is. Anyways, that's where scientists publish and they do publish commentaries on each other's material, especially if it's a review of something contentious or something that's emerging in the field. And now this journal, Perspectives on Psychological Science. There's also an interesting backstory here because that's an American Psychological Society journal.

[Lee Jussim]

Yes.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, so there's two major organizations for psychologists in especially research oriented psychologists in North America. There's the American Psychological association, which has its journals, and then a newer organization which is now a couple of decades old, American Psychological Society. And the American Psychological Society was actually set up at least in part because the American Psychological association had started to become ideologically dominated, particularly in the leftist and progressive direction. And that that was having a arguably negative effect on research reliability, accuracy and probability of publication. That was set up 25.

[Lee Jussim]

Okay, so that's a little off kilter. Yeah, I do know this history in first place, APS started out as the American Psychological Society. They changed their name to the association for Psychological Science in an attempt to be broader. And what triggered the breakaway of APS from APA in the 90s, maybe 90s? Yeah, I think so, yeah. Wasn't political it was the scientists who formed APS believed that APA was too focused on clinical practice and practitioner issues.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right.

[Lee Jussim]

And it was because it was becoming unscientific, but not because of the politics.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, okay, so let. Yeah, yeah, yeah, fair enough. But see, I was watching that happen. Cause I knew some of the people who were setting up the APS at the time. And my sense though also was that part of the reason that the APA was tilting in a more and more clinical direction was because there was an underlying political ethos that was increasingly skeptical of science as the privileged mode of obtaining valid information.

[Lee Jussim]

Yeah, I think that's fair. I think that's fair. Yes.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay.

[Lee Jussim]

Yes.

[Jordan Peterson]

So the proximal cause was the overemphasis on the clinical. But you know, it's also the case that as you've seen, is that certainly the clinical psychology has. And the whole therapeutic enterprise has taken a cataclysmic turned towards the woke direction in the last, especially in the last 10 years. It's been absolutely devastating. And I don't know is social psychology. I think you could probably say the same thing about social psychology. Maybe you could say maybe that's even worse. Anyways, we get into that.

[Lee Jussim]

Well, it's probably worse politically, but it's probably not worse practically because social psychologists don't really aren't responsible for helping anybody get on with their lives. I mean, they're responsible for teaching and students and things they're not in.

[Jordan Peterson]

Typically they're not responsible for implicit bias.

[Lee Jussim]

That's all we can. You're going to get me. You are going to get me distracted. You started by asking me to tell the story of my.

[Jordan Peterson]

Let's continue with that.

[Lee Jussim]

Yes.

[Jordan Peterson]

So now you're. There's 1400 people who write a letter.

[Lee Jussim]

Yes. Declaring all of us, me as well as the other commentators, we're all racists. The editor should be fired and our articles should be taken down. They shouldn't be.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right. So I presume that these 1400 are a subset of the 50,000 activists. Right. Now I'm curious about the 1400 too, because you often see legacy media headline news that 1400 scientists have signed some petition. But then when you look into it, it's often. I know the distinction between graduate student and let's say full fledged scientist is murky. But part of the issue is always, well, exactly who were these 1400 people? Right. And out from under which rocks did they climb? And so who were the 1400? Like roughly speaking, who were these people?

[Lee Jussim]

There was 1400. I mean, I didn't recognize many of the names, but if you assume the first five or ten names are the likely organizers, those were all well established psychologists, especially social psychologists.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, social.

[Lee Jussim]

Okay, yeah, they were social. Huge backlash. And part of the accusation for me in particular was that by using this line from Fiddler on the Roof, there was the time he sold him a horse but delivered a mule as a frame for progressive disingenuousness around diversity. I was comparing black people to mules.

[Jordan Peterson]

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, I see, I see.

[Lee Jussim]

And so that drove.

[Jordan Peterson]

That was your subject, wasn't it?

[Lee Jussim]

Yeah, I was explicit in part of the denunciation.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right, right.

[Lee Jussim]

And so this is an immediate firestorm.

[Jordan Peterson]

This was when. What year did this happen?

[Lee Jussim]

2022.

[Jordan Peterson]

Oh, yeah, 2022.

[Lee Jussim]

There is actually part of this backstory is very interesting. The editor of the journal at the time is European psychologist named Klaus Fiedler. Klaus Fiedler is very accomplished. He's an unbelievably honorable hundreds of journal articles, multiple editions, editorships and awards. He was the editor overseeing all this. And my. And the other commentaries that he eventually accepted started out as simple reviews. So when Hummel submitted his paper, it was subjected to peer review. I was one of the peer reviewers. Oh, yeah. So was one of the other. Fiedler so liked the reviews that he asked all of us to scale them up to full length articles.

[Jordan Peterson]

Scientists publish their research findings and their reviews of the literature in scientific journals. And it's one of the ways that the quality of these articles is vetted is by submitting the manuscripts before they're published to. Well, first of all, the editor reviews them to see if they're even vaguely, possibly suitable for publication in that particular journal on the basis of, let's say, topic and quality and apparently integrity of research. Then they're sent out to experts in that area, multiple experts for analysis. And that's part of the quality control process. And that's worked. That worked pretty well up until about 2015, I would say, or maybe even spectacularly well, all things considered. So that's the peer review process. And what happened in this case was the reviews of this, the peer reviews of this particular article were of sufficient quality so that the editor decided that they might.

[Lee Jussim]

He cite them as commentary.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right. They might turn into standalone pieces with some development.

[Lee Jussim]

But I warned Fiedler, the editor in my review, before anyone had the idea that a version of my review would get published, that if he accepted Hummel's critique of the way in which psychologists write and think about diversity, what they've been advocating with respect to diversity that he would be at heightened risk of people coming after him, demanding the papers be retracted and coming after his job. This is in my review. And Jordan, that is exactly.

[Jordan Peterson]

Was that included when it was published or was that.

[Lee Jussim]

I don't remember. I'd have to go by. I don't. I think I may have taken it out because it wasn't really appropriate because the commentary wasn't. It was about the exchange. It wasn't the message to the end.

[Jordan Peterson]

No. Fine.

[Lee Jussim]

I mean, it's necessarily the case that it sticks. Yeah. So Firestorm, aps, the executive director, committee of ap, whatever that group is of committee put an immediate kibosh on this. It was going to be all published as a discussion forum. That's how Fiedler framed it, as a discussion forum about diversity issues. They put the immediate halt.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, who they?

[Lee Jussim]

The officers of the American. Of the association for Psychological Science.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay. So now they're broadly overseeing the group of journals that publish under their ages.

[Lee Jussim]

Yes, that's right.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay. But they generally don't have an editorial say.

[Lee Jussim]

No, they don't.

[Jordan Peterson]

And shouldn't.

[Lee Jussim]

And shouldn't. Right. But the editor is to some extent beholden. I mean, that's who he's working for, so. Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

But it's still the case that generally they don't do.

[Lee Jussim]

Yeah, they don't do this. Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

Partly because often, well, they don't have the specialized expertise, at least in part, which is partly why they hire the editors to begin with. Who then they give pretty much carte blanche.

[Lee Jussim]

Yes.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right. As they should.

[Lee Jussim]

As they should.

[Jordan Peterson]

As part of academic freedom.

[Lee Jussim]

That's right.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right.

[Lee Jussim]

Yes.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay. But they decided that they were not going to proceed with the publication.

[Lee Jussim]

Well, or so the open letter had two main demands. They weren't even required. They were demands that Fiedler refired and the papers be retracted.

[Jordan Peterson]

Hello, everyone. It's your favorite president, Donald J. Trump, here to introduce something really special. You're going to love it.

[Lee Jussim]

My new Trump watches. It's one of the best watches made.

[Jordan Peterson]

Go to getTrumpWatches.com it's Trump time. Go to getTrumpWatches dot com now to get your Trump watch before they're gone.

[Lee Jussim]

Don't miss your chance to own a piece of history.

[Jordan Peterson]

See gettrumpwatches.com for details.

[Lee Jussim]

Trump watches are not intended for investment purposes.

[Jordan Peterson]

Hurry. Go now to get trumpwatches.com okay.

[Lee Jussim]

They conducted what looks to me what looked to me and really to all of us involved, like a kangaroo court. You know, into what happened. They concluded that Fiedler had somehow violated editorial ethics and norms and.

[Jordan Peterson]

Which is a serious accusation. Yes, like a career ending accusation. If it's true.

[Lee Jussim]

Yes. Well, he's had a very nice career since, so it did not.

[Jordan Peterson]

But that doesn't detract from the seriousness of the allegation. Exactly. The fact that he was able to successfully wend his way through the thicket.

[Lee Jussim]

Yes, exactly. That's right. So he was ousted almost immediately. And then the papers, mine included, that were part of Fiedler's discussion forum and.

[Jordan Peterson]

That had been published.

[Lee Jussim]

They had been accepted but not published.

[Jordan Peterson]

I see. Okay. Okay.

[Lee Jussim]

Accepted but not published.

[Jordan Peterson]

So how the hell did the complainants get access to the papers? Like, how did they know what the papers were if they hadn't been published?

[Lee Jussim]

Well, someone must have, you know, maybe through the editorial process is largely online, so I'm sure they could have accessed the papers through the online editorial process. I'm sure they could have asked Fiedler for the papers had they asked us for the papers.

[Jordan Peterson]

They weren't secret. They weren't secret?

[Lee Jussim]

Yeah, they weren't secret.

[Jordan Peterson]

I mean, people walked publishing their paper so that people. I was just curious because it's strange that a brujah of that sort would emerge prior to publication. But it's. There was quasi publication.

[Lee Jussim]

Yeah, well, it was. Right, exactly. It was accepted but not published. So they ousted him almost immediately. And then the papers, they brought in two special editors to figure out what to do with the papers accepted as part of the discussion forum.

[Jordan Peterson]

And who were these special editors and what made them special?

[Lee Jussim]

Well, there was Samin Vizier and E.J. wagenmakers. And both of them, I think Samin is now the head editor at Psychological Science. So they both have had long careers advocating with some success, for upgrading the quality and credibility and rigor of psychological science.

[Jordan Peterson]

They both have made important contributions that way.

[Lee Jussim]

And so I think that's why they were brought in. They had a certain cachet as able to figure out what to do. I think that's what the APS directory believed.

[Jordan Peterson]

On what grounds do you think this investigation was. Just how was the progression of this investigation justified? I mean, there's no established precedent in the scientific community for reevaluating an editorial decision based on political objection. Right. Like there's no we'll reevaluate if 500 people sign a petition. Like, this isn't the domain of rule or principle or tradition. Right. So what's the fear here? Do you think these 1400 people signed this petition, which is something that takes like two seconds and, and costs you nothing and has no risk to you whatsoever. And so it's not an ethical statement of any profundity unless you're an activist. So what was it, do you think, that raised people's hackles about the mere fact that these complaints had been raised to this second?

[Lee Jussim]

I don't really know, like from their perspective.

[Jordan Peterson]

Are you willing to speculate?

[Lee Jussim]

Well, so sure. The main object of Hummel's critique was a black or biracial social psychologist at Stanford, Stephen Roberts. And Roberts denounced the whole process as racist. Publicly. Okay, okay, Publicly. And I do think that.

[Jordan Peterson]

On what grounds? The mere fact of questioning diversity agenda.

[Lee Jussim]

Well, that constitutes racism. You probably had three main grounds. Yeah, that was one of them. Absolutely. You know, you criticize this, this shows that you're racist. The racism in psych that is pervasive throughout psychology. Right. That would be 1. Grounds. Second ground was my use of this comparing blacks to mules with there was the time he sold a Morrison and delivered a mule. And then the third was there was a considerable. So Fiedler offered.

[Jordan Peterson]

Kind of missing the point of that.

[Lee Jussim]

I know. Yeah, right. Fiedler offered Roberts the opportunity to respond to the full set of papers which were supporting. Were generally supporting Hummel's critique, which was really about diversity in general. But its jumping off point was a prior paper by Roberts.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay.

[Lee Jussim]

But he gave Roberts a chance to reply to the critiques. But there was a considerable back and forth between Roberts and Fiedler about whether, when and how to publish Roberts response. Fiedler was probably kind of a pain in the ass. But in my experience, editors, I don't know how many times I don't have enough fingers and toes to count the number of times I have subjectively experienced editors comments as pains in the ass.

[Jordan Peterson]

But one at least once per paper submitted.

[Lee Jussim]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. But whatever. So. But those were his grounds for denouncing all of us as racist. Fiedler made his life difficult. This whole critique of diversity is a testament to white supremacy pervasive in psychology. And me comparing black people to mules. Right. That was the grounds. And you asked me to speculate. I don't have. I have at best very circumstantial evidence. I may not even have circumstantial evidence. I strongly suspect. I would really like to test this in the lab or in surveys that liberals, especially white liberals, are so wracked with guilt and shame over the bona fide history of white supremacy and discrimination and oppression in The United States, in Europe and especially in the uk it's more about colonialism are so racked with guilt that there is a vulnerability to just believing anything a person from one of these oppressed, stigmatized groups says. Denouncing others.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, well that's a very quick and easy way to signify the fact that you're not part of the professor camp.

[Lee Jussim]

That's right, yes.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well that has no one has that not been formally tested as a hypothesis?

[Lee Jussim]

If it has, I don't know.

[Jordan Peterson]

I don't know.

[Lee Jussim]

I agree.

[Jordan Peterson]

It totally needs to be something like. It's something like from more broadly speaking is that are there. It's a mechanism of gaming the reputation domain. Right. Because obviously our reputations are probably arguably the most valuable commodity, so to speak, that we possess. And every system of value is susceptible to gaming in a variety of ways. And one way of gaming the reputational game is to make claims of reputational virtue that are risk free, broad, immediate and cost free.

[Lee Jussim]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

And for me, if you're accused of something and I can say and accused of transgressing against a group towards whom I feel guilt, I can signify my valor as a moral agent by also denouncing you and it costs me nothing. Which is a big problem. It's like maybe it's the problem of our time. It's a very big problem.

[Lee Jussim]

It's a huge problem.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, especially now because there's something else that's happened. Right. Is that groups of denunciators can get together with much greater ease than they ever could.

[Lee Jussim]

Yes. Because of social media.

[Jordan Peterson]

And the effort necessary to make a denunciation has plummeted to zero. And the consequences of making a false denunciation are also zero.

[Lee Jussim]

Yes.

[Jordan Peterson]

This is not good. It's like denunciation firestorm time. And that's certainly happening.

[Lee Jussim]

Well, so you know, I mostly agree certainly in the short term the personal consequences of engaging in this sort of denunciation behavior are non existent, but the consequences are not non existent. So the credibility and trust and faith in academia has been in decline for a very long time. People hate this kind of stuff. So there was.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, well, just because something's advantageous for some people in the short run does not mean that it's good for the whole game in the medium to long run. Right, that's for sure.

[Lee Jussim]

Yes, that's right. That's exactly.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, that's actually I think in some ways the definition of an impulsive moral error, like if it accrues benefit to you in the short run, but does you win in the Medium run. That's not a very wise strategy.

[Lee Jussim]

Yes, right.

[Jordan Peterson]

And that's what impulsive people do all the time. So. Yes, right, right. That's even the definition of what constitutes a temptation.

[Lee Jussim]

I was recently listening to your interview for this podcast with Keith Campbell on narcissism.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yes.

[Lee Jussim]

And that was one of the things you talked about, the sort of impulse control and short term benefits versus long term benefits, especially regarding social relations.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right. Reputations alone.

[Lee Jussim]

Oh, it's a long term gain. And there has been emerging evidence that people high and left wing authoritarianism, sort of extreme.

[Jordan Peterson]

Now that we all agree that that exists. It started in 2006.

[Lee Jussim]

I know, I know. That's a whole backstory, that's for sure. So. But is correlated with narcissism and that this pleasure that people, that people on this sort of cancel culture that has emerged. I mean the right is not immune to cancel culture type activities, but it emerged primarily originally on the left.

[Jordan Peterson]

Any place infiltrated by narcissists is going to be susceptible to. Exactly. And narcissists will use whatever political stance gains them the most immediate credibility completely independent of the validity of the ideological stance. See, one of the things. We'll get back to the story right away. See, one of the things I've observed this is very interesting because I've talked to a lot of moderate progressives, let's say, or actually even genuine liberals within the Democrat congressmen and senators, many of them. And I've been struck by one thing and I'm curious about what you think about this. We know that a tilt towards empathy. So agreeableness, trade agreeableness. A tilt tilts you in a liberal direction and maybe in a progressive direction. And there are concomitants of being more agreeable on the personality side. But I think one of them is that the moderates that I've talked to always denied the existence of the pathological radicals on the left. And I've really thought, I mean this is to a man or a woman. Yeah, yeah. And I think what it is, I think it has something to do with the unwillingness or inability of the more liberal types to have imagination for evil. Like I would make the case that most criminals, you could validly interpret most criminals whose criminal history is sporadic and short as victims. They've come from abusive families, alcoholic families, often multi generationally antisocial families, et cetera. But there's a subset of criminals, it's 1% of the criminals, 65% of the crimes. There's a subset of criminals who are not victims. They are really monsters. And I don't think there's any imagination for the monstrous in among the compassionate left. It's all victims. It doesn't matter how egregious the crime. Now I would have, that's something I would have tested as a social psychologist if I still had an active research lab, which I don't. But the problem with what we know, that we know from simulations, that networks of cooperators can establish themselves in a way that's mutually beneficial and productive, but that if a shark is dropped into a tank of cooperators, then the shark takes everything. So the problem with being agreeable and cooperative is that the monsters can get you. And if you're temperamentally tilted towards denying the existence of the monster, so much the worse. Now, I made that case because you talked about the relationship between narcissism and left wing authoritarianism. I mean, that narcissism shades into sadism as well. And so this is a, this is a very big problem, especially with online denunciation. Okay, so, yeah, back to 2022.

[Advertisement Speaker]

When a woman experiences an unplanned pregnancy, she often feels alone and afraid. Too often her first response is to seek out an abortion because that's what left leaning institutions have conditioned her to do. But because of the generosity of listeners like you, that search may lead her to a Preborn Network clinic where by the grace of God, she'll choose life. Not just her baby, but for herself. Preborn offers God's love and compassion to hurting women and provides a free ultrasound to introduce them to the life growing inside them. This combination helps women to choose life and it's how preborn saves 200 babies every single day. Thanks to the Daily Wire's partnership with Preborn, we're able to make our powerful documentary Choosing Life available to all on Daily Wire. Plus, join us in thanking Prebox for bringing this important work out from behind our paywall and consider making a donation today to support their life saving work. You can sponsor one ultrasound for just $28. If you have the means, you can sponsor Preborn's entire network for a day for $5,000. Make a donation today. Just dial 250 and say the keyword baby. That's 250 baby. Or go to preborn.com Jordan, that's preborn.com.

[Jordan Peterson]

Now there's debate about whether these papers are going to proceed to publication, right?

[Lee Jussim]

They were.

[Jordan Peterson]

And there's allegations made against the people who wanted to.

[Lee Jussim]

Absolutely. We're all racist and the whole thing is racist and an abuse of editorial power and all these accusations.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right. And the editor loses his position.

[Lee Jussim]

He loses his position. And these two special editors are brought in.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay.

[Lee Jussim]

Negotiations go on for almost two years. Like, what are they negotiating about? Who's going to. So part of Robert's denunciation, public denunciation of all of us, was he posted the draft of his commentary response that was headed for the discussion forum and the full set of emails he exchanged with Fiedler about publishing it. And those are, you know, those are typically confidential communications between an editor and an author. And so.

[Jordan Peterson]

Or at least typically private.

[Lee Jussim]

Yes, right. They're typically private. So that added to the difficulty on the part of the special editors to decide what to do. Because they didn't want to just publish those. Roberts didn't agree not to at first. Fiedler. They wanted Fiedler's permission to publish the correspondence. He wouldn't grant it.

[Jordan Peterson]

So why did Smith have such an outsized say in all this? Like, that isn't how the scientific process generally works.

[Lee Jussim]

So they once APS blew up the journal by firing Fiedler. So there was no.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right, right. Which is like an admission of fault.

[Lee Jussim]

So. And about two thirds of the editorial board resigned when he was ousted.

[Jordan Peterson]

So Pops was allowed resignation.

[Lee Jussim]

Yeah. I don't know whether it was protest. We know they resigned whether it was protest or not. So, so, so they were.

[Jordan Peterson]

Maybe they also thought it was trouble they didn't need.

[Lee Jussim]

Yeah, right, right.

[Jordan Peterson]

I mean, these are generally. If you're, when you're working for a scientific journal, you're not doing it for the money. Right. It's a lot of work. And the editors. Was he paid? Was that his full time job?

[Lee Jussim]

It was not his full time job and I don't know whether he was paid.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right, right. Okay. So that just illustrates the point is that people are doing this because that's actually what you do as a scientist. There's not a lot of, you know, it's a prestigious position and you meet people, you have a certain say over the direction the field might go and those are perks. But generally people do this like they do peer review, because it's part of the tradition of scientific activity. Right, right, right.

[Lee Jussim]

That's right.

[Jordan Peterson]

And so you can see why people might bail out if it was going to just be nothing but reputation catastrophes.

[Lee Jussim]

Exactly. Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

Because they'd be thinking, why the hell am I going to expose myself to like this dismal risk when there's like it's already hard and there's very little upside.

[Lee Jussim]

Right, exactly. Right. Okay. The journal was a mess for a long time. And these editors. And there was this exchange between the editors, Roberts, Fiedler and the other contributors, myself and the other contributors, about whether and when to publish it. And again, this went on for almost two years. So there was like first a discussion, we're going to publish it. Then there was radio silence. Well, it turns out we've run into an obstacle. Can we resolve? And just went on for almost two years. Eventually that was resolved and it was all published. It's all published. And you know, the. Your original question was, was framed as. You can't believe I haven't been subject to cancellation. In fact, I have. I have. You then asked, well, how did you. How did you survive it?

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah.

[Lee Jussim]

So let me add this little punchline.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah.

[Lee Jussim]

At the time that all this was happening, my immediate associate dean, so I was chair of the Psychology department at Rutgers. And Rutgers is in the School of Arts and Sciences. The School of Arts and Sciences has a dean under the. But the School of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers is gigantic. Even as chair, I had very little direct contact with the Dean. The dean was doing big deanly things. But the department chairs have a lot of contact with an associate chairman. So there might be an associate Chair for the Sciences.

[Jordan Peterson]

Associate Dean.

[Lee Jussim]

Associate Dean. Yes. All right, Associate Dean. Yeah, sorry, sorry. Associate Dean. So there'd be an Associate Dean for Math for stem, Associate Dean for Social Science and Associate Dean for Humanities. I had a lot to do with the Associate Dean for Social Sciences, who was a psychologist from the Psychology department. Okay. So I never actually had this conversation exactly with him, but I'm pretty sure he knew about the whole thing a year. So at the end of my term, so this is now 2023, I go on sabbatical. Remember that this event occurred, the POPs event occurred in 2022. It's not till almost two years later that this stuff was published. So I complete my term as Department Chair, 2022. 2022-23, I go on sabbatical. Still not published. And then at the end of that sabbatical term, the Associate Dean approaches me with an offer to chair the anthropology department. Okay, so this is very weird.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, definitely.

[Lee Jussim]

It's very weird. There was an internal political snafu which is beyond the scope of this discussion. And they couldn't appoint an internal chair and they wanted an external. You know, the department needed a chair. The dean's office had a lot of faith and confidence in my ability.

[Jordan Peterson]

Despite this, despite the.

[Lee Jussim]

Because of it. One of the things they said to me was, you Know, this is going to be a difficult situation because the department is not going to be happy about having an outside chair imposed on them. But we know you have a thick skin.

[Jordan Peterson]

Wow.

[Lee Jussim]

And I parlayed that into a very large raise, Jordan. It was one of the best things I've ever done. So not only did I escape cancellation, I parlayed it into an improvement in the quality of life.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, this is a good thing for people to know, too. You know, if you've watched my podcast, you know, because I say this all the time, that mythologically speaking, that every treasure has a dragon, right? And that's a representation of the world because the world is full of threat and opportunity. And the co association of the dragon and the treasure is a mythological trope indicating that there's opportunity where there's peril. But there's a corollary to that, which is a very interesting one, which is where there's peril, there's opportunity. And so you might think when something negative happens to you, let's say, on the social side, that you become the brunt of a cancellation attempt. You might think, oh, my God, my life's over. It's like, yeah, that's one possible outcome. That's the same outcome as, you know, ending up as dragon toast, let's say. But the other outcome is that you find the treasure that's associated with the dragon, and that can definitely happen. And that's a good thing to know because it means that when things become shaky around you, one of the things you can validly ask yourself is, there's something positive lurking here. If I had the wisdom to see it, and the. What would you say? The capacity for transformation necessary to allow the challenge to change me. Yeah, that's right, Jordan.

[Lee Jussim]

I wouldn't wish that. At the time that was happening, it was horrible. Yeah, I wouldn't wish it on anyone. In hindsight, it has made me a better person. And I wouldn't undo it now if I could.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, well, you know what Nietzsche said. If it doesn't kill you.

[Lee Jussim]

Yes.

[Jordan Peterson]

It makes you stronger. Now, unfortunately, there's an if. Well, seriously.

[Lee Jussim]

Right. Yes.

[Jordan Peterson]

So. And the if is that the dragon is real. It's not a game.

[Lee Jussim]

Yeah, right. Well, no fire. The same outfit. Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression keeps a faculty under fire. Database of faculty who have been subject, usually to mob, sometimes administrative investigations, seeking to punish them for what should have been legitimate academic speech protected by academic freedom or even free speech. At US State colleges, they're subject to the First Amendment, which means they shouldn't be in the business, however, hypothetically. Well, yeah, well, yeah. But they have documented that hundreds of faculty have been fired for what should have been legitimately protected speech.

[Jordan Peterson]

So your point about the whole train, conservatives.

[Lee Jussim]

Well, so your metaphor about the dragon is dead on. That there's no guarantee, you know, people have lost their livelihoods running into these dragons. So that. That's not how I've been fortunate that.

[Jordan Peterson]

One concrete recommendations that can be brought out of that too. I would say, like, if you find yourself in serious trouble, this is one of the things I learned about. I learned from dealing with like, very dangerous people in my clinical practice. Let's say dangerous and unstable people. It's a very bad idea to lie when you're in trouble. Like, it's a seriously bad idea. And so if the mob or the monster comes for you, your best defense is extremely cautious, plain truth. Now, that's very different than trying to, what would you say? Strategize and manipulate your way out of a difficult situation. It's also very different than apologizing. And my experience on the woke mob cancellation side is if you lie in your own defense or falsify your speech, you're in serious trouble. And if you apologize, a different mob will just come for you. That'll be the post apology mob that comes for you. It's not a good idea. So, you know, what we've been outlining here is the fact that if you're in serious social peril, there's two outcomes. One is that, and perversely enough, in retrospect, it might turn out to be an opportunity, and one you wouldn't forego now that you know the consequences. That's not impossible, but it's difficult. The other one is you're seriously done. And so then the question is, what can you do to maximize the possibility of the former and minimize the latter? And those are some things that I know. So. Okay, okay, so let's back up a bit then. We still haven't exactly described why the cancellation attempts weren't successful for you. Now, you said you demonstrated your ability to keep a calm head under fire and that you did that well enough so the university actually recognized that and that turned out to be of substantive benefit to you. But we don't know why it was that you maintained a calm head under fire or how you did that without, well, having the reputation damage that was certainly directly implied by the accusation. Take you out. Like, do you have. Was it good fortune? Were there things you did right? Like, how do you. Yeah, how do you assess that?

[Lee Jussim]

Yeah, yeah. So that was not my first, as I mentioned at the beginning, this was not my first go around with this kind of thing. It helps to have some experience. It helps to have done some reading that people have addressed. There's some good articles and essays out there about what to do when you're subject to these attacks. Some of them have very good, make very good points. And so about six months ago, again, I posted an essays on my substack.

[Jordan Peterson]

What's the name of your subsidy?

[Lee Jussim]

Unsafe Science.

[Jordan Peterson]

Unsafe Science.

[Lee Jussim]

It's called My Vita of Denunciation.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay.

[Lee Jussim]

And it's called My Vita of Denunciation because it goes through several of these sorts of attacks that I have been through. And how. First place, it also goes through the tactics. It's a short version. I have a longer version in a different place, but it goes through a short version of how to deal with these attacks. So the very first piece is that if you find yourself in the midst of such an attack, go silent. Go silent. Do not engage. Do not engage with your attackers. Because nearly all of these cancellation type attacks are massive, brutal and short.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right, right, right. Two weeks.

[Lee Jussim]

Yeah, at most.

[Jordan Peterson]

That's right. Yeah, yeah. At most. And people forget, that's the weird thing, because the present is so large. You're going to panic.

[Lee Jussim]

Yes.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, yeah.

[Lee Jussim]

Don't, don't panic. Don't panic.

[Jordan Peterson]

That's right.

[Lee Jussim]

Don't panic.

[Jordan Peterson]

Don't assume.

[Lee Jussim]

That's right.

[Jordan Peterson]

Be successful.

[Lee Jussim]

That's right.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah. Because people, they might be interested in you today, but they weren't interested in you yesterday. Right. They probably won't be interested in you tomorrow.

[Lee Jussim]

And it's just like a giant. As a kid we used to go to the beach and body surf and occasionally like a wave that was way bigger than you could handle would, and there was nothing you could do except let it wash over you and knock you around and you come out and it washes you unsure.

[Jordan Peterson]

As long as you don't do anything to make it worse.

[Lee Jussim]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

Like apologize for.

[Lee Jussim]

You know, I would add this. If you, if you genuinely in your heart of heart believe you have done something wrong, then maybe you should apologize.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, yeah.

[Lee Jussim]

But you should not apologize.

[Jordan Peterson]

Let me add something to that.

[Lee Jussim]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

No, not if you genuinely believe it because you might not be your own best defender. That's why you have a fifth amendment. No seriously conscientious, guilt prone people will accuse themselves. So then I would say if you feel that you've done something wrong, remember the presumption of innocence before provable guilt. Remember that. It applies to you, too. And then go talk to five or six people that you trust and lay out the argument on both sides and see if they think you're the bad guy. Right.

[Lee Jussim]

That's good. I agree with that. You need that. That's good.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah.

[Lee Jussim]

I completely don't assume that you're morally.

[Jordan Peterson]

Obligated to apologize, even if you think. Even if you feel guilty.

[Lee Jussim]

That's right.

[Jordan Peterson]

Because your guilt feelings are not an unerring indication of your guilt.

[Lee Jussim]

That's right. And may distort how you think about your culpability. Yes, definitely. Yeah. No, that's a very good point.

[Jordan Peterson]

See, this is why I think, too, the council mob is particularly effective against genuine conservatives because genuine conservatives tilt towards higher conscientiousness, and it's very easy to make conscientious people feel guilty. Right, right. So that could be weaponized. Okay.

[Lee Jussim]

All right.

[Jordan Peterson]

So go silent.

[Lee Jussim]

Yeah, go silent.

[Jordan Peterson]

Including. You can always apologize in a month after you've thought it through.

[Lee Jussim]

Absolutely.

[Jordan Peterson]

If anyone still cares.

[Lee Jussim]

That's right.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah. Okay. Go silent.

[Lee Jussim]

Go silent. Record everything.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, that's for sure.

[Lee Jussim]

Right. And you're everything. Everything. You don't know how you're gonna use it. You may use it to defend yourself going forward, depending on how things unfold. You may decide after the wave of the attack passes that you want to counterattack.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah. Right. You want Carefully, strategically.

[Lee Jussim]

Carefully and strategically. And by recording everything, you have the raw material to damn your attackers. So. That's right. So go silent.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah. That's especially true if someone's interviewing you. Yeah. It's like, record all of it.

[Lee Jussim]

Record all of it. Yeah, record all of it. Seek allies because you may feel alone. Mobs are very good at coming after somebody who seems alone. But if you can, if you have networks, support networks, activate those networks. If you don't have them. And if you're in the intellectual type of professions, whether it's academia or mainstream media, could be in something else. You probably have a support network, let them know what's going on. My experience has been, at least the kind of networks that I have, people will stand up for you. I mean, I had numbers of people writing essays that got posted in some pretty good places. Real Clear Politics, I think, was one on this POPS fiasco. So actually, of all places, the Chronicle of Higher Ed did some great reporting on it, and they really kind of damned the mob and.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right. That's also why you need that time of silence, is to muster your resources. And you could also assume, even if people are nervous in the aftermath of the accusations, for two or three days or a week even, they may come to their senses as the temperature drops.

[Lee Jussim]

Yes, that's right. Yes, that's absolutely right. Right, so go silent, record everything, activate your support networks. And then again, it depends on the situation it's going to be. It's going to vary from person to person and situation to situation. It depends in part on what your skills and resources are. But then you are ready to either defend yourself and. Or counterattack.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay.

[Lee Jussim]

And I don't. Jordan, I don't know how many essays I posted on Unsafe science surrounding this event. One of them is titled There is no racist Mule Trope. So the argument that the grounds for denouncing me as a racist for comparing black people to mules was that there was a historical trope of making an equivalence between black people and mules. This Roberts presented this, and he had one reference to support this, which I was not familiar with. So I tracked it out.

[Jordan Peterson]

That's what you say.

[Lee Jussim]

Let's see what the article actually says. This article was a really good article. And what it documented was that there was a historical linkage between black people and mules. Because originally, American blacks were overwhelmingly in the American south, in the agrarian South. And so the mule was a symbol of both the kind of work that was done in the south, this agricultural work, and it was a symbol of the flawed liberation of black people from slavery. Because one of the promises that they never delivered on was 40 acres and a mule. And even though that was never delivered on for a very long time, until you had the mass migration into the north, the black people living in the American south, you know, aspire to be successful farmers. And getting a mule was one way to have a successful farm. And so you would see images, whether paintings even, you know, if you go to Southern museums, there's some very famous paintings of black people in fields with a mule pulling a wagon or, I don't know, you know, plow. Cultivated. Yeah, yeah, Like a plow or. Yeah, yes, right. That's very, very common. And in fact, the mule figures fairly largely in African American folk stories from the American South. So he documents all this.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah.

[Lee Jussim]

So much so that the mule really became a symbol of people who were oppressed and part of the liberation of people who were oppressed. So that when, after Martin Luther King's assassination, his casket was pulled in a wagon pulled by mules. Okay, so there. Isn't that amazing? Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

Oh, so it's. Okay. So given all that, it's less surprising that that speculation might have arisen in relationship to your analogy. Things you find out too late.

[Lee Jussim]

Yes, right, right. But it is ironic because mule is the symbol of the liberation from the oppression rather than the oppression.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right, right.

[Lee Jussim]

You know. Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

So, okay, so let me ask you a question about strategy there too. You know, like one, I've spent a lot of time strategizing with people because that was a big part of my clinical practice. But in terms of silence and then mustering your support network. Right. And then you said, well, you can, you can start your defense. It's like my sense is that a good offense is a very strong defense. Right. Because you can, if you're careful now, you know, you can defend yourself or you can turn the tables. And I would say if you're turning the tables because you're angry, that's not a good idea. Because you're going to make mistakes and you're strategizing. Right. I think you can distinguish the search for justice and truth from the search for revenge by the intermediating role of especially resentment. If you're resentfully angry, your head isn't clear. But if you can quell that and you want to establish the truth, and you can do that with a certain amount of detachment, then a good defensive strategy is offense. It's like what's. Actually. You can flip the table, so to speak. And the problem with a defense is there's something, well, defensive. Defensive.

[Lee Jussim]

There's not a defensive. Absolutely. Yes. Yes.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, I might have made a mistake. No, no, you're. You're seriously wrong.

[Lee Jussim]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

And in a manner that's actually detrimental to the cause you purport to be putting forward. Yeah. Okay.

[Lee Jussim]

Yeah, well, so that and some of the prior experiences fueled what was then very early interests in left wing authoritarianism and far left radicalization and its consequences. And so I've been doing all sorts of studies on that.

[Jordan Peterson]

All right, look, we have to stop this part of the discussion, even though there's like 50 other things I want to talk to you about. But we'll continue. I'm going to, I think, focus the discussion on the Daily wire side. You guys listening on YouTube know about this? That we do. Another half an hour there, I think I'm going to talk about categorization and implicit bias and delve a little bit more into social psychology's role, for better or worse, in promoting many of the policies, the DEI policies, for example, and justifying them hypothetically on scientific grounds. I want to delve into that because it's definitely been social psychologists who've been particularly interested in the issue of implicit bias, even though to some degree that notion came from the clinical world, including from people like Carl Jung who were very interested in the idea of complex and implicit association back in the 1920s. Anyways, there's a veneer of scientific respectability that's been laid over the diversity, inclusivity and equity claims. The notion of implicit and systemic bias. And that's always bothered me because I think the social psychologists have done a terrible job distinguishing between categorization, which is like the basis of perception itself, bias. Because you can't consider categorization bias. It's like, that's insane. That's insane. Even though the postmodernists really do make that claim and Lee's done work too looking at the accuracy of such things as stereo so called stereotypes. Because what's the difference between a stereotype and a category? Like, that's a. That is a hard question. You could spend a thousand years trying to figure that out. Anyways, I think that's what we'll delve into if you want to join us on the Daily Wire side. And so thank you very much sir, for offering what you know and also your story to the more general public. And join us on the Daily Royal side if you want to continue with the discussion.