Agreeing to Disagree: A Respectful Reply to a Senior Statesman of Political Psychology

Abstract

politicized political psychology: White's work on minimal deterrence and Sears's work on symbolic racism. Both research programs fail the turnabout test-a thought experiment which asks us to imagine the professional reaction to investigators who use exactly the same standards of evidence and proof as liberal investigators but who argue for politically conservative conclusions. After all has been said and done in this extended exchange, no one claims that these research programs do pass the turnabout test, and no one denies that the turnabout test is a useful heuristic for calibrating how politicized a research program has become. Sears ignores the issue by focusing on those aspects of his research program that do not involve labeling opponents of affirmative action or busing as ipso facto racist. Kroeger and Sapiro evade the issue by focusing on alleged violations of scholarly civility and by proposing to merge scientific and moral-political values. From my perspective, the most constructive response to the target article comes from White who acknowledges that in at least two cases he failed to give due weight to alternative causal hypotheses that merited careful consideration: specifically, alternative (non-conflict-spiral) explanations for the brief AmericanSoviet detente of 1963 and for the escalating sequence of moves and countermoves preceding World War I. It would be a mistake, however, to view these mistakes as isolated lapses of logic or attention to evidence. For example, Amitai Etzioni (1967) made exactly the same mistake with respect to the events leading up to the partial nuclear test ban treaty of 1963. And although I can document many favorable citations to Etzioni (1967) in textbooks, I have yet to locate a serious scientific dissent in the political psychological literature. No one supposes that a conservative investigator who leapt to the counterfactual conclusion that had it not been for Reagan's policies, the Soviet Union would still exist would have been acclaimed by SPSSI or elected to the presidency of ISPP. When