Early in Social Perception and Social Reality (Jussim Reference Jussim2012), Jussim declares his work to be a “scholarly and intellectual (rather than political) polemic” (p. vii).What is the ultimate goal of this polemic? On the one hand, the Précis target article and the underlying book can be read as a relatively specific argument against a movement in social psychological research which, Jussim argues, eclipsed older accuracy research in the 1950s and overstated the strength and prevalence of self-fulfilling prophecies and systematic bias in social perception. On the other hand, Jussim also implies that the acceptance of axiomatic assumptions by these literatures, and overstatement of effects (whether intentional or not) fitted a progressive political climate. Thus, Jussim's argument is more than simply an argument about correspondence to “social reality”; it also represents a turn against social constructivism's “highly politicized . . . [concern] with liberating underprivileged or low-status people from, to use some favorite constructivist terms (in their view), oppressive, patriarchal, or Euro-centric hegemonic discourses and practices” (p. 174).
At each of these two scales – as a technical critique of the conduct and interpretation of specific studies, and as an academic-political call for a return to objective research about the nature of the world – Jussim will no doubt succeed in arousing controversy and debate. Rather than contribute directly to this debate, however, our goal is instead to explore unresolved issues which arise when moving between these two scales of argument. In this commentary, we focus on two specific arenas – Jussim's perspectives regarding the nature of “social reality” and the sociology of science – which we believe provide particularly interesting directions for future discussions into the nature and measurement of the social world.
Jussim's claim that accuracy research is possible and desirable – in other words, that the social world can be more-or-less accurately assessed – is rooted in a specific view of what “social reality” and “the social world” are like. Jussim repeatedly invokes “probabilistic realism” – the assertion, in some form common to all sciences, that there is an observer-independent reality under study mixed with different strands of probabilism, all of which soften the strict need for phenomena to always be observed in the same way given the same conditions. Jussim then uses this groundwork to guide subsequent observations when extrapolating from laboratory to field studies, and then to common-sense reasoning about the everyday world (Jussim Reference Jussim2012, Chs. 10–11).
In our view, this extrapolation produces two concerns, both of which are common in experimental social psychology (one of the authors’ fields of study). First, the approach ignores the potentially “dappled” nature of the social world (Cartwright Reference Cartwright1999) and second, neglects the constitutive and ongoing role of institutions to create, feed and sustain self-fulfilling prophecies, stereotyping, and the classification and categorization of people (Berger & LuckmannReference Berger and Luckmann1966). In other words, experimental studies tend to carefully “freeze” institutions so they behave as though they are unchanging (e.g., Hacking Reference Hacking1983). Greater consideration of how institutions, observers, and what is being observed intersect may help Jussim sustain extrapolating from experimental studies to full-blown “social reality.”
For example, Jussim couples a view of people as generally socially astute to a definition of social institutions as arrangements that remain fixed once first negotiated (p. 5; p. 177). Moreover, while acknowledging that many social institutions – from sports games to markets to politics – may be created through social agreement, Jussim thereafter views them as effectively “in place,” with “all sorts of outcomes [which] occur independent of individual perceivers’ beliefs, predictions, or expectations” now possible (p. 177). Treating institutions as “frozen” sets of stable rules in this way seems to offer its greatest advantage because it resembles the judgment of tangible or materially “indexical” phenomena (Peirce Reference Peirce1991). This approach includes important aspects of social reality, including social judgments which can be explicitly yoked to observable physical behaviors within such “frozen” institutional contexts, such as observing a home-run hit in a single baseball game (p. 176–77).
While the advantages of Jussim's approach are relatively clear in these cases, they become less so when the same approach is applied to less tangible phenomena (e.g., properties of individual persons or groups). To clarify the boundaries of his claims, Jussim may want to engage more carefully with the “constructivist” literature. Some of the points made by these scholars – that labels applied to and theories about objects – whether material things or people – in fact partly constitute and transform what they are and how they behave (Hacking Reference Hacking2004; Putnam Reference Putnam1988; Searle Reference Searle1995) can help clarify which aspects of social reality can be accurately perceived, and how much so. For example, Jussim treats economic markets as an aspect of social reality which exists “independent of individual perceivers’ beliefs, predictions, or expectations” (p. 177), whereas for other social scientists, the very same intangible entity is a classic example of an institution which can be structured by (expert) expectations of its operation (Healy Reference Healy2015; MacKenzie Reference MacKenzie2008). Such examples suggest that within the social world of interest to Jussim and many other social scientists, some phenomena exist along a spectrum of “realize-ability” via accuracy measures – and that exploring this potential ambiguity may help understand when social judgments can be meaningfully described as accurate, and to what degree they are so.
When making arguments about markets and other institutions, Jussim carefully restricts the definition of accuracy to “correspondence between perceivers’ beliefs … and what those target people are actually like, independent of perceivers’ influence on them” (p. 172). One of the crucial phrases of this definition – “independent of perceivers’ influence on [what is being perceived]” – once again is reasonable in the case of “brute facts” of the material world (Searle Reference Searle1995) and the carefully controlled conditions of the lab. But beyond specific criticisms of field experiments concerning self-fulfilling prophecies in situations of real-world categorization (e.g., Pygmalion in the Classroom; Rosenthal & Jacbosen Reference Rosenthal and Jacobson1968), Jussim seems to assume that this definition holds even if it scales from laboratory to field observation to everyday life. This strikes us as needing more systematic argument at a minimum, since in many meaningful instances of “everyday life” categorization and perception (ranging from Merton's original essays about self-fulfilling prophecies themselves to institutional student tracking in education based upon standardized testing) perceivers – even as individuals – often occupy roles which, insofar as they potentiate perceptions by embedding them in institutions, hardly seem “independent of influence.”
The interdependence of perceivers, the perceived, and the institutions in which both exist, is well-illustrated by recent sociological research that explores how perceptions of race, the criminal justice system, and life chances intertwine. One of Jussim's favored criteria for establishing an objective grounding for judgments of accuracy is nationally representative surveys (such as the “objective data” of the U.S. census; p. 178). And yet important recent work (Penner & Saperstein Reference Penner and Saperstein2008) has shown (a) that even well-known surveys with highly-standardized measures like the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 20% of respondents’ interviewer-reported race changed over the course of the survey, and (b) that these changes – the likelihood of the respondent being coded by the interviewer and self-identifying as black – were significantly correlated with changes in social status (such as incarceration, falling into poverty, and becoming unemployed). Likewise, Jussim also favors “simple, clear, objective criteria” such as the fact of being married, one's education, as a clear-cut groundwork for judging the accuracy of perception (p. 177). And yet, another important study in sociology, this time an “experimental audit” (Pager Reference Pager2003) of hiring practices measuring call-backs for those self-reporting a non-violent drug offense was (a) designed precisely to manipulate the “accuracy” of such “objective” criteria as a criminal record in the real world (in no reported cases was this manipulation discovered by subjects of the field experiment), and (b) found that the strongest effect in the study was of being both black and reporting a non-violent criminal conviction. Of course, neither of these studies directly undermines Jussim's criticism regarding the particulars of social psychological studies. Instead, they illustrate how, at the intersection of perceiving and perceived groups and social institutions, “objective” criteria can carry stereotypical assumptions within them, and that those exercising stereotypical judgments (e.g., that black criminals make poor employees) in fact often make such judgments in socially influential and consequential settings.
We note that Jussim contains carefully limited claims (e.g., “Prior self-fulfilling prophecies might explain some difference between targets that are accurately perceived;” p. 168; see also p. 160); however, these qualifications are themselves embedded in a larger narrative regarding the highly politicized conduct of scientific research. Jussim describes how social perception research “banished” attention to accuracy and became “infatuated” with studying bias, an event driven in part by the “manifestly political agenda” of yearning to improve the lives of people who social-psychological researchers viewed as oppressed and downtrodden (p. 154). This position, construed as a technical argument within psychology, bears an interesting resemblance to positions described in Kuhn's (Reference Kuhn1962/1996) analysis of scientific paradigms. Indeed, at this narrower level, one might construe the process of (potentially) over-reading key “paradigmatic” studies and their progressive extension of a research program based upon them (to the comparative neglect of “anomalous” preceding and contemporary studies; Lakatos Reference Lakatos1999) as an established feature of scientific growth and change, as opposed to a particularly political moment within the history of social psychology.
While we agree with Jussim's broader position that scientists should pursue research where it leads, even on disturbing topics (a stance which harkens back to classic statements in the sociology of science; Merton Reference Merton1996; Weber Reference Weber, Gerth and Wright Mills1922/1946), we believe that dialogue with literatures on the intersection of science, legitimacy, objectivity, and politics (e.g. Gieryn Reference Gieryn1983; Frickel & Gross Reference Frickel and Gross2005; Latour Reference LaTour1999) will be vital if Jussim wishes to sustain a position as a disinterested student of the “truth” (“even with a ‘small t’”; p. 175; see also p. 154). This recurring issue with scientific paradigms is worthy of systematic discussion, since it constitutes a crucial foundation for productive intellectual debate.
In sum, we find that Jussim represents an opportunity for a broader discussion about the nature of “social reality” as studied by social psychologists, as well as a chance to clarify the intellectual politics of that discussion.
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Early in Social Perception and Social Reality (Jussim Reference Jussim2012), Jussim declares his work to be a “scholarly and intellectual (rather than political) polemic” (p. vii).What is the ultimate goal of this polemic? On the one hand, the Précis target article and the underlying book can be read as a relatively specific argument against a movement in social psychological research which, Jussim argues, eclipsed older accuracy research in the 1950s and overstated the strength and prevalence of self-fulfilling prophecies and systematic bias in social perception. On the other hand, Jussim also implies that the acceptance of axiomatic assumptions by these literatures, and overstatement of effects (whether intentional or not) fitted a progressive political climate. Thus, Jussim's argument is more than simply an argument about correspondence to “social reality”; it also represents a turn against social constructivism's “highly politicized . . . [concern] with liberating underprivileged or low-status people from, to use some favorite constructivist terms (in their view), oppressive, patriarchal, or Euro-centric hegemonic discourses and practices” (p. 174).
At each of these two scales – as a technical critique of the conduct and interpretation of specific studies, and as an academic-political call for a return to objective research about the nature of the world – Jussim will no doubt succeed in arousing controversy and debate. Rather than contribute directly to this debate, however, our goal is instead to explore unresolved issues which arise when moving between these two scales of argument. In this commentary, we focus on two specific arenas – Jussim's perspectives regarding the nature of “social reality” and the sociology of science – which we believe provide particularly interesting directions for future discussions into the nature and measurement of the social world.
Jussim's claim that accuracy research is possible and desirable – in other words, that the social world can be more-or-less accurately assessed – is rooted in a specific view of what “social reality” and “the social world” are like. Jussim repeatedly invokes “probabilistic realism” – the assertion, in some form common to all sciences, that there is an observer-independent reality under study mixed with different strands of probabilism, all of which soften the strict need for phenomena to always be observed in the same way given the same conditions. Jussim then uses this groundwork to guide subsequent observations when extrapolating from laboratory to field studies, and then to common-sense reasoning about the everyday world (Jussim Reference Jussim2012, Chs. 10–11).
In our view, this extrapolation produces two concerns, both of which are common in experimental social psychology (one of the authors’ fields of study). First, the approach ignores the potentially “dappled” nature of the social world (Cartwright Reference Cartwright1999) and second, neglects the constitutive and ongoing role of institutions to create, feed and sustain self-fulfilling prophecies, stereotyping, and the classification and categorization of people (Berger & LuckmannReference Berger and Luckmann1966). In other words, experimental studies tend to carefully “freeze” institutions so they behave as though they are unchanging (e.g., Hacking Reference Hacking1983). Greater consideration of how institutions, observers, and what is being observed intersect may help Jussim sustain extrapolating from experimental studies to full-blown “social reality.”
For example, Jussim couples a view of people as generally socially astute to a definition of social institutions as arrangements that remain fixed once first negotiated (p. 5; p. 177). Moreover, while acknowledging that many social institutions – from sports games to markets to politics – may be created through social agreement, Jussim thereafter views them as effectively “in place,” with “all sorts of outcomes [which] occur independent of individual perceivers’ beliefs, predictions, or expectations” now possible (p. 177). Treating institutions as “frozen” sets of stable rules in this way seems to offer its greatest advantage because it resembles the judgment of tangible or materially “indexical” phenomena (Peirce Reference Peirce1991). This approach includes important aspects of social reality, including social judgments which can be explicitly yoked to observable physical behaviors within such “frozen” institutional contexts, such as observing a home-run hit in a single baseball game (p. 176–77).
While the advantages of Jussim's approach are relatively clear in these cases, they become less so when the same approach is applied to less tangible phenomena (e.g., properties of individual persons or groups). To clarify the boundaries of his claims, Jussim may want to engage more carefully with the “constructivist” literature. Some of the points made by these scholars – that labels applied to and theories about objects – whether material things or people – in fact partly constitute and transform what they are and how they behave (Hacking Reference Hacking2004; Putnam Reference Putnam1988; Searle Reference Searle1995) can help clarify which aspects of social reality can be accurately perceived, and how much so. For example, Jussim treats economic markets as an aspect of social reality which exists “independent of individual perceivers’ beliefs, predictions, or expectations” (p. 177), whereas for other social scientists, the very same intangible entity is a classic example of an institution which can be structured by (expert) expectations of its operation (Healy Reference Healy2015; MacKenzie Reference MacKenzie2008). Such examples suggest that within the social world of interest to Jussim and many other social scientists, some phenomena exist along a spectrum of “realize-ability” via accuracy measures – and that exploring this potential ambiguity may help understand when social judgments can be meaningfully described as accurate, and to what degree they are so.
When making arguments about markets and other institutions, Jussim carefully restricts the definition of accuracy to “correspondence between perceivers’ beliefs … and what those target people are actually like, independent of perceivers’ influence on them” (p. 172). One of the crucial phrases of this definition – “independent of perceivers’ influence on [what is being perceived]” – once again is reasonable in the case of “brute facts” of the material world (Searle Reference Searle1995) and the carefully controlled conditions of the lab. But beyond specific criticisms of field experiments concerning self-fulfilling prophecies in situations of real-world categorization (e.g., Pygmalion in the Classroom; Rosenthal & Jacbosen Reference Rosenthal and Jacobson1968), Jussim seems to assume that this definition holds even if it scales from laboratory to field observation to everyday life. This strikes us as needing more systematic argument at a minimum, since in many meaningful instances of “everyday life” categorization and perception (ranging from Merton's original essays about self-fulfilling prophecies themselves to institutional student tracking in education based upon standardized testing) perceivers – even as individuals – often occupy roles which, insofar as they potentiate perceptions by embedding them in institutions, hardly seem “independent of influence.”
The interdependence of perceivers, the perceived, and the institutions in which both exist, is well-illustrated by recent sociological research that explores how perceptions of race, the criminal justice system, and life chances intertwine. One of Jussim's favored criteria for establishing an objective grounding for judgments of accuracy is nationally representative surveys (such as the “objective data” of the U.S. census; p. 178). And yet important recent work (Penner & Saperstein Reference Penner and Saperstein2008) has shown (a) that even well-known surveys with highly-standardized measures like the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 20% of respondents’ interviewer-reported race changed over the course of the survey, and (b) that these changes – the likelihood of the respondent being coded by the interviewer and self-identifying as black – were significantly correlated with changes in social status (such as incarceration, falling into poverty, and becoming unemployed). Likewise, Jussim also favors “simple, clear, objective criteria” such as the fact of being married, one's education, as a clear-cut groundwork for judging the accuracy of perception (p. 177). And yet, another important study in sociology, this time an “experimental audit” (Pager Reference Pager2003) of hiring practices measuring call-backs for those self-reporting a non-violent drug offense was (a) designed precisely to manipulate the “accuracy” of such “objective” criteria as a criminal record in the real world (in no reported cases was this manipulation discovered by subjects of the field experiment), and (b) found that the strongest effect in the study was of being both black and reporting a non-violent criminal conviction. Of course, neither of these studies directly undermines Jussim's criticism regarding the particulars of social psychological studies. Instead, they illustrate how, at the intersection of perceiving and perceived groups and social institutions, “objective” criteria can carry stereotypical assumptions within them, and that those exercising stereotypical judgments (e.g., that black criminals make poor employees) in fact often make such judgments in socially influential and consequential settings.
We note that Jussim contains carefully limited claims (e.g., “Prior self-fulfilling prophecies might explain some difference between targets that are accurately perceived;” p. 168; see also p. 160); however, these qualifications are themselves embedded in a larger narrative regarding the highly politicized conduct of scientific research. Jussim describes how social perception research “banished” attention to accuracy and became “infatuated” with studying bias, an event driven in part by the “manifestly political agenda” of yearning to improve the lives of people who social-psychological researchers viewed as oppressed and downtrodden (p. 154). This position, construed as a technical argument within psychology, bears an interesting resemblance to positions described in Kuhn's (Reference Kuhn1962/1996) analysis of scientific paradigms. Indeed, at this narrower level, one might construe the process of (potentially) over-reading key “paradigmatic” studies and their progressive extension of a research program based upon them (to the comparative neglect of “anomalous” preceding and contemporary studies; Lakatos Reference Lakatos1999) as an established feature of scientific growth and change, as opposed to a particularly political moment within the history of social psychology.
While we agree with Jussim's broader position that scientists should pursue research where it leads, even on disturbing topics (a stance which harkens back to classic statements in the sociology of science; Merton Reference Merton1996; Weber Reference Weber, Gerth and Wright Mills1922/1946), we believe that dialogue with literatures on the intersection of science, legitimacy, objectivity, and politics (e.g. Gieryn Reference Gieryn1983; Frickel & Gross Reference Frickel and Gross2005; Latour Reference LaTour1999) will be vital if Jussim wishes to sustain a position as a disinterested student of the “truth” (“even with a ‘small t’”; p. 175; see also p. 154). This recurring issue with scientific paradigms is worthy of systematic discussion, since it constitutes a crucial foundation for productive intellectual debate.
In sum, we find that Jussim represents an opportunity for a broader discussion about the nature of “social reality” as studied by social psychologists, as well as a chance to clarify the intellectual politics of that discussion.