{"id":201225,"date":"2026-08-23T10:57:48","date_gmt":"2026-08-23T18:57:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=201225"},"modified":"2026-08-23T12:40:51","modified_gmt":"2026-08-23T20:40:51","slug":"strange-bedfellows-in-cambridge-and-ghent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=201225","title":{"rendered":"Strange Bedfellows in Cambridge and Ghent"},"content":{"rendered":"

Psychological Inquiry<\/a> has a paper by David Pinsof, David O. Sears<\/a> and Martie G. Haselton<\/a> called \u201cStrange bedfellows: the Alliance Theory of political belief systems<\/a>.\u201d Its claim is that political beliefs come out of alliance structures. People pick allies by similarity, by transitivity, and by interdependence, then support those allies with three families of propagandistic bias. The paper holds that these run symmetrically across the spectrum. Run that apparatus over the Cofnas<\/a>–Arday<\/a> affair and most of the commentary of the past month becomes predictable.<\/p>\n

Start with transitivity, which the paper defines as sharing the same allies and rivals, and which it treats as the strongest force in ally selection because it heads off infighting and betrayal. Every participant in this affair knew the roster on July 20. Cofnas is a rival of the diversity coalition. Arday was an ally of it. When a rival attacks an ally, transitivity assigns everyone a position before a single citation gets checked. The enemy of my friend is my enemy, and the accusation he carries inherits his standing. <\/p>\n

Perpetrator biases arrive next. The paper describes them as downplaying responsibility, emphasizing mitigating circumstances, embellishing good intentions, and minimizing the severity of harm, and its central finding is that people apply these to allies as they apply them to themselves. The defense of Arday runs the full sequence. Errors rather than fraud. A childhood diagnosis. Pressures placed on him by an institution that promoted him. A career of good work reduced to a citation problem by people acting in bad faith. <\/p>\n

The instructive case is Cofnas running the same bias on the same man. His Wall Street Journal<\/a> piece of August 21 says Arday was an adult and morally responsible, then says he was mostly responding to incentives created by other people, and that his punishment exceeded any wrongdoing he may have committed. Perpetrator bias applied to the man he exposed. Alliance Theory explains the switch. Arday has stopped being the rival and become the exhibit, and the rival is now Cambridge, the press, and Ghent<\/a>. The bias follows the roster.<\/p>\n

Victim biases run on both sides and produce what the literature calls competitive victimhood, where each party works to establish that it suffered the greater injustice. One side gives us an essay on institutional murder<\/a>, a vigil in Trafalgar Square<\/a> blaming the press, and an account in The Nation<\/a> of a funded transatlantic machine. The other gives us a Journal headline about a scapegoat, an inventory of death threats and smears, a politician denouncing a man by name, and the loss of a job. Both sides raise the perpetrator\u2019s intent to malevolence, deny mitigating circumstances, and stretch the harm. Pinsof, Sears and Haselton note that victim claims sit awkwardly with any theory about protecting one\u2019s self-image, since they advertise weakness, and make better sense as recruitment. <\/p>\n

This story is attribution dispute all the way down. The paper\u2019s finding is that people credit their allies\u2019 advantages to internal causes and their disadvantages to external ones. Ask why Arday rose. One roster answers merit, the other answers preference. Ask why he fell. One answers fraud, the other answers a racist press. Ask why Cofnas lost two posts in two years. One answers his conduct, the other answers a taboo. <\/p>\n

Cofnas is defended by the Committee for Academic Freedom<\/a>, by Jerry Coyne<\/a>, by Maarten Boudry<\/a>, who thinks the hereditarian program is wrong, by the British right-wing press, by anonymous accounts that would embarrass all of the above, and by the American ambassador in Brussels<\/a>, who has announced a review of the government\u2019s relationships with a Belgian university over its handling of one postdoc. <\/p>\n

A coalition assembled around free expression now includes a state reviewing a foreign university\u2019s personnel decisions. On the other side, a union that condemns attacks on journalists singled out<\/a> for criticism the man who published a story nobody has faulted for accuracy, and a coalition built on defending scholarly standards is defending a man against a plagiarism finding. The paper predicts patchwork narratives with incompatible principles, generated by the alliance.<\/p>\n

The theory also predicts who breaks ranks and at what cost. Its claim about loyal partisans is that they are the most willing to condone what they would otherwise condemn, which makes defection a signal of a weak alliance. Brian Leiter<\/a> grants that many of the allegations were warranted and faults the manner of the exposure. Steven Pinker<\/a> grants the findings and calls the research program a place not to go. Boudry defends a man whose central thesis he rejects. Each of these people holds a status base that does not depend on the coalition he is defecting from.<\/p>\n

The frame has limits. Applied without discipline it becomes unfalsifiable, since any position can be recoded as loyalty and any evidence-following person can be described as roster-following. The discipline available here is the coding test. Take fifty commentators with a public record on affirmative action before July 21, 2026. Code that record. Then code each one\u2019s current position on whether the plagiarism claims are substantiated, on whether the exposure was legitimate, and on whether Ghent acted properly. If prior position predicts current position at a high rate, the theory has earned its keep on a live case. If it predicts poorly, the theory has taken a hit. Run the same design on a second list: people who demanded retraction and accountability in earlier fraud cases and now call this a witch-hunt, and people who demanded due process for accused academics and now welcome a suspension delivered by administrative letter. Both lists can be built from public statements with dates.<\/p>\n

Arday’s thesis is here<\/a>. Paula Zwozdiak-Myers’s 2009 thesis is here<\/a>. The Cofnas post is here<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Further reading. Pinsof\u2019s frame descends from Peter DeScioli and Robert Kurzban, \u201cA Solution to the Mysteries of Morality<\/a>,\u201d Psychological Bulletin<\/em><\/a> 139 (2013), which treats moral condemnation as a coordination device for taking sides. Eric Luis Uhlmann and colleagues, \u201cThe Motivated Use of Moral Principles<\/a>,\u201d Judgment and Decision Making<\/em> 4 (2009), supplies the experimental core of the double standards argument. Jason Weeden and Robert Kurzban<\/a>\u2019s The Hidden Agenda of the Political Mind<\/em><\/a> (Princeton, 2014) develops the interdependence half of ally selection. Roy Baumeister\u2019s Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty<\/em><\/a> (Freeman, 1997) is the source of the perpetrator and victim bias asymmetry that Alliance Theory borrows, and its chapter on the magnitude gap is the best short account of why two parties to the same event describe two different events. For the competitive victimhood literature, Masi Noor and colleagues, \u201cWhen Suffering Begets Suffering<\/a>,\u201d Personality and Social Psychology Review<\/em> 16 (2012).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Psychological Inquiry has a paper by David Pinsof, David O. Sears and Martie G. Haselton called \u201cStrange bedfellows: the Alliance Theory of political belief systems.\u201d Its claim is that political beliefs come out of alliance structures. People pick allies by … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[43035],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-201225","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alliance-theory"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201225","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=201225"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201225\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":201279,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201225\/revisions\/201279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=201225"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=201225"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=201225"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}