Luke Ford

On September 7, 2011, Tilburg University issued a press release. Diederik Stapel (b. 1966), professor of cognitive social psychology, dean of the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences, a star who published in Science and appeared on Dutch television, had used fictitious data in his publications. Three junior researchers had gathered their courage and gone over his head. Stapel ran his lab on charm and intimidation, and doubting his numbers meant doubting the most celebrated man in the building. The students went anyway. Within weeks the fraud unraveled. Fifty-eight papers came down. Investigators concluded that the failure ran deeper than one liar. The field tolerated small samples, flexible analysis, and results too good to be true. The final report described a general neglect of scientific standards from bottom to top.

One year later, in 2012, a new assistant professor arrived in Stapel’s old department. Mark J. Brandt came from Chicago with a fresh PhD from DePaul University, a school that does not appear on lists of elite psychology programs, following a BA from Concordia University Chicago, a small Lutheran college in River Forest, Illinois. He had no famous adviser to trade on and no Ivy League line on his vita. He walked into a Dutch department that had just fired its most famous member and now had to decide what kind of science it wanted to do.

The timing shaped a career. There is no evidence that the Stapel affair converted Brandt to anything. His methodological instincts predate his arrival. But he built his reputation during the years when social psychology conducted its public reckoning, and the two projects that define him, the substantive one and the methodological one, turn out to be the same project. Both ask a question that sounds like an insult and functions as a research design: how do you know you sampled fairly?

Brandt is now an associate professor of psychology at Michigan State University, where he directs the Belief Systems Laboratory. Since January 2025 he has served with Elizabeth Suhay of American University as co-editor-in-chief of Political Psychology, the journal of the International Society of Political Psychology. In the first half of 2026 he held a fellowship at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, working on how threatening life experiences change, or fail to change, political beliefs. His work has drawn more than 27,000 citations. The man from the small Lutheran college now helps decide what counts as knowledge in his field.

His research answers a question most people believe they can answer without research. What happens when a person meets a group that violates his values?

For decades the discipline had a settled answer, and the answer had a politics. The dominant program, associated with John Jost (b. 1968) of New York University, held that conservatism appeals to people with stronger needs for order, certainty, and closure, greater sensitivity to threat, and greater resistance to change. On this account, prejudice, dogmatism, and motivated reasoning cluster on the right because the conservative mind is built to produce them. The literature supporting this view was large, and much of it was sound as far as it went. Conservatives do score somewhat higher on self-reported dogmatism, preference for order, and resistance to change.

Brandt noticed something about how far it went. Consider the surveys behind the prejudice findings. A respondent in Ohio sits with a questionnaire and a feeling thermometer. She rates atheists, feminists, gay men, environmentalists, welfare recipients, illegal immigrants. If she is conservative and Christian, she rates several of these groups cold, and the correlation between conservatism and prejudice appears in the data. The questionnaire rarely asks her liberal neighbor to rate Christian fundamentalists, businessmen, the military, opponents of abortion. The instrument samples the enemies of one side.

Graduate students learn to call this a confound. Brandt and his collaborators, Jarret Crawford, John Chambers, Geoffrey Wetherell, and his old adviser Christine Reyna, called it the target selection problem, and in 2014 they built the ideological-conflict hypothesis on it. Broaden the list of target groups and the picture changes. Conservatives express hostility toward groups they perceive as liberal. Liberals express hostility toward groups they perceive as conservative. Ideological distance predicts the hostility better than the target's social status and better than whether membership in the group is chosen. Each side runs the same engine and points it at different people.

The hypothesis gets flattened into a slogan, both sides are equally prejudiced, and the slogan misstates it. Brandt has never established equality and his later work explains why the claim fails. What he established is narrower and harder to escape. You cannot measure the prejudice of one coalition using only the sacred objects of that coalition. Any study of intolerance that samples targets from one side of the political field measures ideology twice and calls the second measurement science.

Where the hostility comes from turned out to be the more revealing question. In work with Wetherell and Reyna, Brandt found that people on both sides were willing to discriminate against ideologically distant groups, and that the willingness ran through perceived value violation. The respondent does not reject the group as strange. He rejects it as dangerous to something he holds sacred. For conservatives the violated values cluster around tradition, religion, loyalty, and social order. For liberals they cluster around harm, fairness, and equality. In each case the target stops being a fellow citizen with different opinions and becomes a moral threat.

The symmetry has limits, and Brandt keeps the limits in view. Liberal commitments to universalism sometimes restrain discrimination even against disliked groups. Conservative traditionalism sometimes licenses it, while conservative self-reliance can restrain it. The engine is shared. The moral content that governs the engine differs, and content decides what people do with their hostility. A creed of universal rights and a creed of purity and hierarchy channel the same impulse toward different acts.

In 2017 Brandt did something rare in his field. He made himself falsifiable. “Predicting Ideological Prejudice,” published in Psychological Science, used American National Election Studies data to build a quantitative model. Feed in the perceived ideology of a target group and the model predicts the direction and approximate size of prejudice toward it from across the spectrum. As a group is seen as more liberal, conservative warmth toward it drops on a predictable slope. As a group is seen as more conservative, liberal warmth drops on the mirror slope. Perceived ideology beat perceived status and perceived choice as a predictor. The model could be wrong in public, about direction and about magnitude, and that was the point. A theory that explains every result after it appears explains nothing.

Religion gave him his cleanest test case, and it is the one nearest his own origins, whatever those origins mean to him. He does not discuss his beliefs in his published work. He was trained at a college of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, a denomination that holds to biblical inerrancy, and he went on to study religious fundamentalism as a psychologist rather than a critic. His master's thesis at DePaul examined how religious distinctions shape perceptions of other people's humanity. Early work with Reyna argued that fundamentalism supplies certainty, coherence, and closure, which helps explain its association with prejudice toward groups that challenge its moral order. So far, the standard story.

Then he ran the study the standard story never ran. With Daryl Van Tongeren he compared people high and low in religious fundamentalism, sampling targets on both sides of the religious divide. Fundamentalists disliked groups that challenged traditional religion. Secular respondents disliked fundamentalists and groups associated with them, at magnitudes the old literature never looked for because it never asked. Unbelief confers no exemption from the psychology of the sacred. The atheist defending science against creationists and the creationist defending Genesis against atheists are, at the level of process, doing the same thing. At the level of institutions they are not, and Brandt says so. Hostility toward a powerful church differs in its consequences from hostility toward a small sect, and doctrine embedded in institutions can regulate lives in ways private disbelief cannot.

The relationship with Jost's program deserves care, because Brandt is often cast as Jost's opposite and the casting misleads. Brandt accepts the reproducible average differences. His objection targets the leap from average dispositional differences to the claim that motivated reasoning and intolerance are properties of the right. He separates two questions the older literature merged. Does one side score higher on general measures of rigidity? Sometimes, modestly, conservatives do. Does one side defend its commitments when challenged, accept congenial evidence, follow partisan cues, avoid opposing views? Both do, and studies claiming otherwise have a habit of failing when someone tries them again. With Thomas Collins and Crawford, Brandt reported unsuccessful replications of findings that conservatives were especially prone to avoid cognitive dissonance.

His mature position appears in the 2025 Annual Review of Psychology chapter written with Nour Kteily of Northwestern, a shared-authorship survey of the entire terrain: values, personality, rigidity, threat sensitivity, authoritarianism, misinformation, empathy, prejudice, violence. Their conclusion resists both camps. People across the divide are more similar than scholars appreciate, and differences remain, in values, in authoritarian expression, in information environments, in which groups get targeted. Whether an asymmetry appears depends on what you measure, on which ideological dimension you examine, and on whether your design threatens both sides in comparable ways. Call it conditional similarity. It sells no books. It fits the data.

The chapter also preserves a distinction the symmetry debate keeps losing. Similar psychology does not produce equivalent politics. A cold rating on a thermometer is one thing. Exclusion from employment, education, or citizenship is another, and groups differ in their capacity to convert hostility into consequences. They differ in size, resources, institutional access, and command of state power. Brandt's framework requires studying people symmetrically while refusing to assume that political reality is symmetric. The capacity for dogmatism is widely distributed. Who gets harmed by it is a question of history and power.

His second research program starts from a different failure of the standard approach. Attitude research studies opinions one at a time, as if a man's view of immigration developed in a sealed room, apart from his views on crime, welfare, religion, and the two parties. Brandt models beliefs as networks. Attitudes and identities are nodes. Relationships among them are edges. Some beliefs sit at the center, holding many others in place. Some sit at the edge, connected to little.

The finding that emerged from this work, in research with Chris Sibley and Danny Osborne using centrality measures, reverses the folk model of the citizen. Party loyalties, ideological labels, and attachments to political groups sit nearer the center of most belief networks than positions on any policy. The policies orbit the identity. A voter opposes a program because the other party proposes it more often than he joins a party after reasoning through its programs. Philip Converse (1928-2014) asked half a century ago whether ordinary citizens have coherent belief systems at all. Brandt's answer replaces the yes-or-no question with measurement: here is how organized this person's beliefs are, here is what sits at the center, here is how a change in one place propagates or fails to propagate. Experiments with Felicity Turner-Zwinkels confirmed the propagation. Move a targeted attitude and the movement spreads to its near neighbors in the network and dies before reaching the far ones. Later work found that central attitudes resist change over time, held in place by their many connections, the way a well-anchored post resists a shove that would topple a loose one.

The practical reading is short. Persuasion aimed at a peripheral policy stays where it lands. Persuasion aimed at a central identity might reorganize a worldview, or might trigger the immune response, because the central belief holds up too much to be surrendered at a stranger's request.

His third program tests the oldest claim in political psychology, that threat drives people to the right. The claim survives on its vagueness. Threat covers job loss, terrorism, disease, divorce, bereavement, exclusion, and these are different experiences that touch different beliefs. Using World Values Survey data on more than 60,000 people across 56 countries and territories, Brandt and his collaborators found that the threat-politics relationship depends on the threat, the belief, and the country. Economic fear can push people toward the economic left, toward the welfare protections that answer it. Fear of violence correlates with culturally right-wing positions. No general drift rightward appears.

Then history ran the experiment no review board would approve. The COVID-19 pandemic arrived as a massive, sudden, worldwide threat, and Brandt's team had fine-grained American attitude data running before, through, and after its onset: 84 political attitudes, repeated cross-sections totaling more than 230,000 respondents, plus a panel. Threat perceptions jumped. The attitudes mostly held. Changes were small, concentrated in domains touching the crisis, and rarely matched what the grand theories predicted. A historic emergency wrote almost nothing on the supposedly threat-sensitive political mind, because the mind was not blank. People routed the pandemic through the party loyalties and moral commitments they already had, and the same virus confirmed opposite worldviews. His NIAS project extends the program, mapping which experiences move which political domains, and whether personal crises like bereavement and job loss work through different channels than collective ones like recession and terror. His findings to date counsel low expectations. Adult political belief is stable, and even severe experience tends to produce selective adjustment rather than conversion.

Beneath all three programs runs the methodological commitment, and here the Tilburg years return. Brandt joined the Open Science Collaboration and the Many Labs replication projects. With coauthors he published the replication recipe, practical standards for reproducing a study so that the result means something: faithful method, adequate power, analyses specified in advance, everything reported. He helped build the Collaborative Replications and Education Project, which turns undergraduate methods courses into contributors to coordinated replication research, training students in the habits the Stapel generation never learned. And he has pressed the critique past statistics into theory. He and his colleagues catalog what they call questionable theoretical practices: theories defined loosely enough to fit any result, convenient examples presented as confirmation, moderators invented after a replication fails. A theory managed this way cannot lose, which means it cannot win.

The connection to his substantive work is direct. Claims about liberal and conservative psychology change with the stimuli. Choose targets one side hates, and that side looks prejudiced. Choose threats that map to one side's issues, and threat appears to drive people toward the other. Sampling is not a technicality in this field. It is where the politics gets in.

The discipline has noticed. The Society for Personality and Social Psychology gave Brandt its SAGE Young Scholar Award in 2018. The International Society of Political Psychology gave him the Jim Sidanius Early Career Award in 2021, the year the worldview-conflict research he built with Crawford also received the Daniel M. Wegner Theoretical Innovation Prize. The editorship of Political Psychology followed. He and Suhay took over manuscript processing in January 2025 with an agenda of transparency, registered reports, structured critical exchange, and broader international participation. The journal sits between two disciplines that distrust each other's methods, psychologists with their laboratory experiments and political scientists with their institutions and power, and Brandt's own work has spent fifteen years connecting the levels, individual perception to group hierarchy, personal attitude to party system, private fear to national context.

What he offers, in the end, is a colder and more useful map of political hatred than either partisan story. Prejudice grows from the perception that another group threatens the values holding a worldview together, and that perception is available to everyone. Beliefs persist because they are woven into networks of identity and loyalty, and crises rarely rewrite the networks. More evidence fails against a belief that carries a person's identity, condemning the other side's intolerance leaves your own invisible to you, and treating ideology as a fixed personality type ignores the groups and institutions that give it content. None of this cures polarization. It explains, with unusual restraint for a field that once loved elegant universal claims, why the popular cures fail.

Three students at Tilburg doubted a star and were right. The lesson Brandt's career draws from that year is not about one fraud. Check the sample. Check it especially when the finding flatters the people doing the checking.

Notes

Tilburg suspended Stapel in September 2011 for using fictitious data, with the rector forming the Levelt committee. Retraction count: 58 publications retracted by 2015. The whistleblowers and Stapel’s status: three young Tilburg researchers exposed him, and his star standing plus his habit of stamping out dissent deterred doubters. The systemic finding: the panels found neglect of scientific standards from bottom to top and a sloppy research culture. Sources: Retraction Watch, Science, and the British Psychological Society.

Career facts: BA Concordia University Chicago 2007, MA and PhD DePaul 2010 and 2012, assistant then associate professor at Tilburg 2012-2020, then Michigan State. Citations: over 27,000 on Google Scholar. Sources: Brandt CV, Google Scholar, and TBS Laboratory.

Editorship: Brandt and Elizabeth Suhay are editors-in-chief of Political Psychology, and the new team began processing manuscripts January 13, 2025. Source: ISPP journal announcement.

NIAS: theme group fellow, semester 2 of 2025-2026. The project title “A Comprehensive Map of the Threat-Politics Relationship”.

Annual Review chapter: Kteily and Brandt, 2025, volume 76, pages 501-529, reviewing dispositions, information processing, and interpersonal behavior, concluding people across the divide are more similar than scholars appreciate, and the lab lists it as shared authorship. Sources: Annual Review of Psychology and TBS Laboratory.

COVID study: 84 political attitudes, 8 threats, N=232,684 cross-sectional plus a 552-person panel; changes were small and rarely matched theoretical predictions. Source: UBC colloquium page.

Central attitudes resist change: panel and experimental studies found central attitudes more stable and more resistant, though similarly persuadable. Source: ResearchGate publication list.

Key papers for your citation trail: Brandt, “Predicting Ideological Prejudice,” Psychological Science 2017; Brandt, Sibley, and Osborne, “What Is Central to Political Belief System Networks,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 2019; Brandt and Sleegers, Personality and Social Psychology Review 2021; Brandt and Crawford, “Worldview Conflict and Prejudice,” Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 2020. All are listed at TBS Laboratory publications.

Extrapolations you can keep without a link. Concordia University Chicago as a small Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod college in River Forest is standard fact; the inference that Brandt lacked an elite pipeline is self-evident from the CV. The Ohio respondent with the feeling thermometer is a composite of how ANES prejudice items work, not a specific person. The line that Brandt does not discuss his own religious beliefs in his published work is accurate as far as I can find, but it is a claim about absence. I gave Jost‘s birth year as 1968 from general knowledge. Stapel’s 1966 and Converse‘s 1928-2014 are confirmed.

Current Directions in Psychological Science. The full cite: “The Ideological-Conflict Hypothesis: Intolerance Among Both Liberals and Conservatives,” Current Directions in Psychological Science, 23(1), 27-34.

The Revaluation: Mark Brandt and the Currency of Scientific Capital

In the winter of 2000, Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) stood before his audience at the Collège de France and turned his instruments on science itself. He had spent forty years arguing that every social arena runs on struggle, that art, religion, law, and the academy each constitute a field where players compete for capital the field alone can mint. Now, dying, he asked the question his critics had waited for. If science is a field of interested struggle like the others, why believe anything it produces? The lectures became his last book, Science of Science and Reflexivity, and his answer holds the key to a career that began nine years later in Chicago and passed through the wreckage of Dutch social psychology.

Bourdieu's answer, in short: the scientific field is a struggle like the others, with one structural peculiarity. The stake is the monopoly of scientific authority, and in a field with high autonomy the only weapons the game accepts are demonstrations. To beat a rival you must mobilize methods, data, and proofs that the rival's allies can check. Interest drives the players; the rules of the field launder interest into knowledge. When autonomy fails, when standing can be won through charm, volume, or friends in the press, the laundering stops, and the field produces careers instead of truth.

Begin, then, with the capital. In 2011 Diederik Stapel held nearly every form the field of social psychology could issue. Institutional capital: full professor and dean at Tilburg University. Symbolic capital: papers in Science, prizes, a reputation as the man with the golden touch. Social capital: co-authors and doctoral students across two continents, a Dutch press that called him for comment on the news of the day. His findings had the exact quality the field then paid for. They were counterintuitive, tidy, and telegenic. Thinking about meat makes people selfish. Messy environments make people discriminate. The market price of such results was high, and Stapel manufactured them, because the field, as then constituted, assayed the coin by its shine.

The same year, a graduate student at DePaul University finished a dissertation on whether psychological dispositions carry fixed political meanings. Mark Brandt held almost no capital of any kind. His BA came from Concordia University Chicago, a small Lutheran college in River Forest. DePaul granted respectable degrees that opened no doors by themselves. His adviser, Christine Reyna, ran a serious lab, and no network of elite placement ran through it. In Bourdieu's terms, Brandt entered the field without inherited position, and entrants without inherited position face a standard choice. They can pursue a succession strategy, playing the established game and waiting decades for their turn, or a subversion strategy, attacking the going definition of excellence and betting the field can be made to change its price list.

The bet only pays when the price list is already cracking. Brandt's timing, which he did not choose, put him at the crack.

Three publications in 2011 did to psychology's currency what a bank run does to a currency of the older kind. Daryl Bem (b. 1938) published evidence for precognition in the field's flagship journal, using the field's standard methods, which meant the standard methods could prove anything. Simmons, Nelson, and Simonsohn published “False-Positive Psychology,” showing that ordinary analytic flexibility let a researcher find significance for absurd claims. And Tilburg suspended Stapel, whose fraud had passed every checkpoint the field maintained for fifteen years. The three cases differed in culpability and agreed in implication. The counterintuitive finding in the glamour journal, the asset on which thousands of careers were built, had no reliable backing. The Levelt inquiry made the systemic point official: the failure ran from bottom to top, through reviewers who liked results tidy and journals that printed what was too good to be true.

What followed was a revaluation, and Bourdieu supplies the vocabulary the participants lacked. A reform faction, centered on figures like Brian Nosek and institutionalized in the Center for Open Science from 2013, moved to demonetize the old capital and mint new denominations: preregistration, direct replication, open data, open code, large collaborative samples. The Reproducibility Project delivered the devaluation notice in 2015, reporting that of one hundred published psychology findings, roughly a third replicated. Incumbents rich in the old currency experienced what Bourdieu calls hysteresis, the lag of a habitus trained for a game that no longer exists. Men who had spent twenty years perfecting the elegant small-sample study woke to find their skill reclassified as a questionable research practice. Some adapted. Some spent the decade writing indignant commentaries, which is what hysteresis sounds like in print.

Robert Merton (1910-2003) had described the norms such reforms invoke, communalism, universalism, disinterestedness, organized skepticism, and treated them as the working ethos of science. Bourdieu's amendment, in the 1975 paper that founded his sociology of science, was that the norms double as weapons. Players invoke the official values of the field against rivals whose position depends on quietly violating them, and this interested invocation, whatever its motives, can force the field toward its own professed standards. The replication movement is the amendment enacted. The reformers did not import foreign values into psychology. They took the field's Mertonian catechism, which every incumbent had recited in every methods course, and presented the bill.

Brandt arrived at Tilburg in 2012, one year after the suspension, a new assistant professor in the department that had employed the fraud. He bought the new currency at issue price. He joined the Open Science Collaboration and the Many Labs projects, the large multi-site efforts that made replication a genre rather than an insult. In 2014 he led “The Replication Recipe,” a widely cited standard for what makes a replication convincing: faithful method, adequate power, analyses fixed in advance, everything reported. He helped build the Collaborative Replications and Education Project, which converts undergraduate methods courses into replication engines, reproducing the new habitus in the next generation, which is how a revaluation becomes permanent. A newcomer with nothing invested in the old assets lost nothing in their collapse and held early positions in the new ones. By the time preregistration badges appeared on journal covers, the man from Concordia held a portfolio.

That is the first layer, and if it were the only layer Brandt might merely be a well-timed methodologist. The second layer concerns what he did with the new capital, and here Bourdieu's account of autonomy and its limits does its best work.

No scientific field floats free. Each sits inside the field of power and imports pressures from it, and psychology imports politics through the composition of its producers, who sit, by every survey, almost entirely on the left. From this population had come a doxa, a background certainty too obvious to defend: rigidity, intolerance, and motivated reasoning belong to the right. The certainty rested on a large literature, and the literature rested on an unexamined practice. Researchers measured prejudice against atheists, feminists, and gay men, the sacred objects of one coalition, and rarely against fundamentalists, businessmen, and soldiers, the sacred objects of the other. The instrument sampled one side's enemies and the field mistook its own political homogeneity for a finding about conservative minds. Nobody conspired. Doxa needs no conspiracy. It needs only a room where everyone shares the same blind spot and no one's career depends on naming it.

Heterodoxy against a doxa can travel two roads, and the two roads illustrate Bourdieu's central claim about autonomous fields. The first road runs outward, toward the public. A critic can convert scientific standing into public capital, denounce the discipline's politics in the press, found organizations, address donors and legislators. Jonathan Haidt (b. 1963) took a version of this road with the Heterodox Academy, and the road has a known toll: the field discounts the capital of members who appeal over its head, whatever the merits, because such appeals attack the field's autonomy, its jealously guarded right to judge its own products. The second road runs inward. The critic frames the heterodox claim in the field's most autonomous language, method, and forces colleagues to answer it on ground where their own professed rules bind them.

Brandt took the second road without detour. The ideological-conflict hypothesis, built with Crawford, Chambers, Wetherell, and Reyna, never argued that psychology discriminates against conservatives. It argued that the prejudice literature had a target selection problem, a sampling error, the kind of error the replication movement had just spent three years teaching the field to fear. The timing made the two projects one. Having helped raise the field's methodological anxiety, Brandt directed the anxiety at the field's most politically comfortable literature. A reviewer who had accepted preregistration and adequate power had already accepted the premise that convenient sampling corrupts inference, and could not reject the ideological-conflict papers without rejecting the reform he had just endorsed. The heterodoxy arrived dressed in the new orthodoxy's own uniform. In 2017 Brandt pressed the advantage with the move the new regime paid best: a quantitative model of ideological prejudice, published with its predictions exposed, falsifiable in public. Under the old currency a finding gained value by surprising the reader. Under the new one it gained value by risking failure, and Brandt's model risked failure about the doxa itself.

Consecration followed, in the sequence Bourdieu's studies of academic careers describe. The SAGE Young Scholar Award in 2018 marked him as legitimate. The International Society of Political Psychology's early career award in 2021, and the theory prize for the worldview-conflict program the same year, marked the heterodoxy itself as legitimate, the field absorbing its challenger, which is how fields survive. The Annual Review chapter with Nour Kteily in 2025 belongs to a consecrated genre: the invitation-only synthesis, the text through which a field announces what it now believes, assigned to authors it now trusts. And in January 2025 came the form of capital that stands above the others because it issues them. Brandt became co-editor-in-chief of Political Psychology with Elizabeth Suhay. An editor consecrates. He decides which manuscripts enter the record, which methods count as sound, which young researchers acquire the line on the vita that Brandt himself once lacked. Thirteen years separate the unconsecrated arrival at Tilburg from the desk where the field's judgments get made. Bourdieu spent Homo Academicus mapping how long that road runs for men without inherited position. It runs shorter during a revaluation, for those who hold the new currency early.

A Bourdieusian reading owes its subject the reflexive turn, and two questions survive the celebration. The first concerns the new regime. Orthodoxies do not end; they rotate. Preregistration and open data now function as badge capital, and badge capital can be gamed as shine once was, preregistrations written loosely, registered predictions quietly outrun by the prose. The reform generation now holds the editorships and the prize committees, and its convenient beliefs will be tacit to it, as target selection was tacit to the generation before. Where the new blind spot sits is a question Brandt's own method says someone outside the current distribution of capital will answer.

The second question cuts closer. Conditional similarity, the position Brandt and Kteily defend, that the two sides share psychological machinery while differing in values, targets, and institutional power, happens to be the position that maximizes standing with every audience at once. It concedes enough asymmetry to keep the left-leaning field, enough symmetry to draw citations from the field's critics, enough complexity to fill an Annual Review chapter. A cynic reads the position as portfolio management. Bourdieu declines the cynicism, and his reason is the argument of the deathbed lectures. In a field with restored autonomy, the strategy that maximizes standing is the strategy that survives checking, because checking is what the field now pays for. Brandt's position holds across audiences because he built it from representative targets, exposed predictions, and replications that others could run, and interest and evidence point, for the moment, in the same direction. That alignment is not a personal virtue. It is what a scientific field produces when its currency is sound, and it is the outcome Bourdieu, turning his sociology of struggle on his own trade in the last winters of his life, argued was worth the struggle to secure.

The field did not reward Brandt despite his lack of inherited capital. It rewarded him because a collapse had wiped out the inherited capital of others, and he held the only assets the new regime honored: methods anyone could audit, and a willingness to be wrong in public. Stapel's currency needed the field's trust and could not survive its scrutiny. Brandt's needs the scrutiny and cannot survive without it.

Notes

Structure. The essay runs one argument through two layers. Layer one: the replication crisis as a revaluation of scientific capital, with Brandt entering at the crack and buying the new currency at issue price. Layer two: the rigidity-of-the-right literature as doxa in a politically homogeneous producer field, and Brandt’s heterodoxy succeeding because it wore the new orthodoxy’s uniform. The frame Bourdieu texts doing the work: “The Specificity of the Scientific Field and the Social Conditions of the Progress of Reason” (1975, Social Science Information) for capital, autonomy, and norms-as-weapons; Homo Academicus (1984) for consecration and career time; Science of Science and Reflexivity (2004, from the 2000-2001 Collège de France lectures) for the deathbed question and the answer that closes the essay. Merton comes in once, as the man whose norms Bourdieu reweaponized, which is the scholarly lineage and lets you cite both authorities.

Scenes and status details. Bourdieu’s last lectures open the essay; the closing returns there so the frame brackets the subject. Stapel‘s 2011 portfolio and Brandt‘s 2011 empty portfolio are set side by side as the two positions before the crash. The consecration sequence, SAGE 2018, ISPP and Wegner 2021, Annual Review 2025, editorship January 2025, is arranged as Bourdieu arranges academic careers, ending on the desk that issues capital to others.

The reflexive section. Bourdieu without reflexivity is hagiography with jargon, so the essay asks the two questions the frame demands: what the new regime’s badge capital conceals, and whether conditional similarity is portfolio management. I resolved the second with Bourdieu’s own late argument rather than a verdict of my own, which keeps it analysis rather than character reference. If you think the resolution is too generous to Brandt, the cut point is the sentence beginning “Bourdieu declines the cynicism”; everything after can end harder.

Sources beyond the ones already given in this thread. Bourdieu 1975: “The Specificity of the Scientific Field and the Social Conditions of the Progress of Reason”. Science of Science and Reflexivity, Polity/University of Chicago Press, 2004. Bem, “Feeling the Future,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2011. Simmons, Nelson, Simonsohn, “False-Positive Psychology,” Psychological Science, 2011. Open Science Collaboration, “Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science,” Science, 2015, the 36 percent figure, which I rendered as “roughly a third.” Brandt et al., “The Replication Recipe,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2014. Center for Open Science founding, 2013. The Stapel, Levelt, editorship, Annual Review, and award material carries over from the sourcing in the first essay.

Extrapolations. The claim that psychology’s producers sit almost entirely on the left is well documented; see Duarte et al., “Political Diversity Will Improve Social Psychological Science,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2015, though note Haidt is a co-author, so you may prefer Langbert’s or Inbar and Lammers’ survey data. Inbar and Lammers, Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2012, found roughly six percent of social psychologists self-identify as conservative. Bem’s birth year 1938 and Haidt’s 1963 come from general knowledge. The line that Stapel’s press called him about the news of the day is an extrapolation from his documented media profile in the Dutch press; the “messy environments” finding refers to his retracted 2011 Science paper on disorder and discrimination, which is accurate to cite as retracted. The characterization of Reyna’s lab as serious but not a placement network is my inference from the CV record. Whether Brandt himself would accept the Haidt contrast as fair is unknown; the essay attributes no motive to either man, only strategy, which keeps it inside the NYT test.

What Nobody Decided: Mark Brandt and the Tacit Practices of Political Psychology

Picture a graduate student in 2005 building a prejudice study. She does what her training taught her hands to do. She pulls the standard scales from the literature, the feeling thermometers with their standard target lists: atheists, feminists, gay men, welfare recipients, illegal immigrants. She adds nothing and removes nothing, because the reviewers recognize these lists, her adviser used these lists, the classic papers validated these lists. She makes no decision about whom to sample. The decision was made for her by no one, transmitted to her through worked examples and corrected drafts, and she will transmit it the same way. When her data show that conservatism predicts prejudice, the finding will be true of her instrument and she will read it as true of the world.

Stephen P. Turner (b. 1951) has spent a career on what is happening in that room. His subject is the tacit, the part of competence that runs beneath articulation, and his account of it is the deflationary one. Michael Polanyi (1891-1976) established the topic with the observation that we know more than we can tell. A tradition after Polanyi inflated the insight into something grander, shared paradigms, collective presuppositions, a group mind holding the discipline's assumptions in common. Turner's work, from The Social Theory of Practices: Tradition, Tacit Knowledge, and Presuppositions in 1994 through Understanding the Tacit twenty years later, dismantles the inflation. There is no collective object, no shared premise stored in some disciplinary cloud. There are only individuals, each habituated through similar training paths, each carrying in his own hands and hunches the residue of the same worked examples. What looks like a discipline's shared presupposition is a population of separately trained people whose habits happen to converge because their apprenticeships did. The convergence needs no agreement, no doctrine, and no decision.

Two consequences follow. First, what was never articulated was never argued for, and what was never argued for has never paid the bill of justification. Tacit practices enjoy a structural immunity. You cannot contest a claim nobody made. Second, beliefs resting on tacit practice can be convenient without anyone arranging the convenience. A belief is convenient, in the sense Turner's framework isolates, when it serves the interests of its holders and when the practices generating it stay below articulation, so that holding it costs nothing and examining it occurs to no one. Convenience is not fraud. Fraud requires a decision, and the entire point is that no decision happens.

The pre-Brandt consensus in political psychology was a convenient belief. A discipline whose producers sat almost entirely on the left had established that rigidity, intolerance, and motivated reasoning belong to the right. The belief flattered its holders, and it rested on a practice nobody could see because everybody performed it. Target selection ran on inherited scales, and the scales sampled the sacred objects of one coalition. The practice was tacit in Turner's exact sense. No methods section defended the target lists, because the lists arrived as equipment rather than as choices, the way a carpenter's grip arrives with the hammer. A researcher who used them displayed competence. A researcher who questioned them had no vocabulary for the question, because the vocabulary is what did not exist. The belief and the practice sustained each other in the dark, and the arrangement could have run indefinitely, since the population that might have noticed the sampling shared the training that made the sampling invisible.

What Brandt did, read through Turner, was articulation. The ideological-conflict papers he built with Crawford, Chambers, Wetherell, and Reyna took a practice that lived in hands and gave it a name, the target selection problem, and a description precise enough to test. Articulation is a status change, and the change is irreversible. Before the name, using the standard lists was competence. After the name, using the standard lists is a defense of the standard lists, a claim, contestable, billable. The practice did not merely become visible. It became an assertion its users had never intended to make and now had to either justify or abandon. Reviewers who had waved the old instruments through for twenty years began asking authors why their targets all came from one side, and the question, once askable, could not be unasked. Turner's framework explains why the field experienced Brandt's move as it did, as something between a discovery and an accusation. Articulating a tacit practice always carries that double charge, because it reveals to practitioners a decision they were making without deciding.

The articulation landed when it did because the field had entered a general wave of it. The replication reform that followed 2011 was, in Turner's terms, a campaign to force tacit practice into explicit rule across the board. The old research culture ran on unarticulated craft: when to stop collecting data, which analyses to try, which studies to write up. The reforms demanded that the craft be stated in advance and in writing. Preregistration is nothing else. It is compulsory articulation, the requirement that a researcher tell before he knows, so that the telling can be checked against the doing. Brandt worked on the instruments of the campaign, the Many Labs collaborations, the replication recipe that spelled out what a convincing replication must state. And his substantive heterodoxy rode the wave, because a field freshly convinced that unarticulated practice hides error had lost its immune response to the news that its most comfortable literature rested on exactly that.

Turner's deflationary account also explains the part of Brandt's program that a triumphal reading misses. Articulation does not replace the tacit. It relocates it. A rule, once written, must still be applied, and application is a skill, and skill is tacit, and the regress has no floor. Brandt appears to understand this in his hands if not in these words, because his most farsighted project is the Collaborative Replications and Education Project, which embeds the new practices in undergraduate methods courses. CREP does not argue students into open science. It habituates them, through worked examples and corrected drafts, the same channel that transmitted the old target lists. The reform reproduces itself by apprenticeship because there is no other channel. On Turner's account there never is.

Which brings the frame to its second application, the one that runs forward. The open science movement now holds the journals, the badges, and the prize committees. Its practices are hardening from campaign into training, from explicit rule into the next generation's unexamined equipment, and Turner's framework predicts with some confidence what comes next. New tacit layers are forming now, in the gap between rule and application. What must a preregistration specify, and how loosely may it say it? Which deviations from plan count as reasonable adaptation and which as the old flexibility in new clothes? When a registered prediction fails, how much interpretive rescue is craft and how much is evasion? No document settles these questions. Reviewers settle them case by case, by feel, and the feel is being transmitted to students as competence, unarticulated, undefended, unbilled.

And around the new practices, convenient beliefs are available for the growing. That transparency guarantees validity, when it guarantees only checkability. That what replicates is important, when replicability screens for stability, not for significance or truth. That the methodological reform solved the field's political problem, when it articulated one blind spot while leaving the producer population unchanged, so that the conditions that grew the last convenient belief remain fully in place, waiting to grow another one whose location, by the nature of the case, nobody inside can currently see. The belief that the field has been fixed may become the most convenient belief of all, since it retires the very vigilance that produced the fix.

Does Brandt hold convenient beliefs? Turner's framework says a belief can be convenient and true; the two properties live on different axes. The test the framework does offer is practical. Are the practices generating the belief articulated, and does the holder keep them under the discipline of checking? Conditional similarity, the position Brandt and Kteily defend, is comfortable for a man who needs standing with a left-leaning field and credibility with its critics, and comfort is a warning, never a verdict. What can be said is that Brandt has kept his generating practices unusually explicit, representative target sampling stated as a rule, predictions exposed in advance, models built to fail in public. Articulation is the only known solvent for convenience, and he applies it to his own work at a rate the field does not require of him. Whether he will keep applying it now that his practices are becoming the water, and he is one of the men who decides what the training transmits, is the open question, and Turner's framework says his intentions will have less to do with the answer than his students' habits will.

Turner's larger work on expertise supplies the stakes. In Liberal Democracy 3.0: Civil Society in an Age of Experts he describes the modern arrangement in which publics accept expert claims on trust, without the capacity to audit the practices behind them. Political psychology's findings about who is prejudiced and who is rigid travel into journalism, law, and policy on that trust, and the tacit layer is where the trust gets spent, because the tacit layer is what no outsider can inspect and no insider thinks to mention. A field that studies bias owes its audiences an account of where its own practices hide, and for one practice, in one literature, at one moment, Brandt provided it. The graduate student of 2005 assembled her target list without a decision. The graduate student of 2026 assembles hers knowing the list is a claim. That difference is the contribution, and it is a large one, and Turner's framework adds the caution that keeps it honest. Somewhere in the equipment of 2026, arriving as competence, transmitted through corrected drafts, another undecided decision is settling in, and the person who will one day name it is unlikely to be anyone now senior enough to have stopped noticing.

Notes

Structure. The essay runs Turner’s framework in three movements: the tacit practice (target selection as inherited equipment, no decision anywhere), the articulation (Brandt naming the practice converts it from competence into claim), and the forward application (the open science regime growing its own tacit layer and its own candidate convenient beliefs). The opening and closing scenes mirror: the 2005 graduate student who assembles a target list without a decision, the 2026 student who assembles one knowing it is a claim, with a new undecided decision settling into her equipment. That mirroring carries the frame’s central point, that articulation relocates the tacit rather than abolishing it.
The Brandt-convenience question. I handled it with Turner’s test rather than a sincerity verdict: convenience and truth live on different axes, and the only solvent is keeping generating practices articulated and checked. The essay credits Brandt with doing this at an above-required rate and leaves open whether he continues once his practices become the training. If you want it colder, cut the sentence beginning “What can be said is that Brandt has kept” and let the open question stand alone.

Sources. Turner: The Social Theory of Practices: Tradition, Tacit Knowledge, and Presuppositions (University of Chicago Press, 1994); Understanding the Tacit (Routledge, 2014); Liberal Democracy 3.0: Civil Society in an Age of Experts (SAGE, 2003). Polanyi: The Tacit Dimension (1966), source of “we know more than we can tell,” which I paraphrased at that length deliberately. Brandt facts, ideological-conflict papers and co-authors, Many Labs, replication recipe, CREP, the Kteily chapter, carry over from the sourcing in the first two essays; the CREP description as undergraduate-embedded replication training is on the lab’s materials and the CREP project page at OSF.

Extrapolations. The 2005 graduate student is a composite built from how survey research training works, inherited scales, reviewer recognition, adviser precedent; no link needed, but she is illustrative, not a person. The claim that no methods sections defended target lists is a generalization about the pre-2014 literature that Brandt’s own papers document by implication; it is defensible but stated broadly, and you could soften to “rarely defended” at no cost. The three candidate convenient beliefs of open science (transparency equals validity, replicable equals important, the field is fixed) are my construction within the frame, presented as predictions the framework generates rather than as documented positions anyone holds, which keeps them inside the NYT test. The questions about preregistration looseness and deviation-judging reflect live methodological debate; if you want an anchor, the literature on preregistration adherence includes Claesen et al., “Comparing dream to reality,” Royal Society Open Science 2021, which found frequent undisclosed deviations: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.211037.

New Haven, the early 1990s. Graduate students in the humanities and social sciences earn stipends that qualify them for food assistance while they teach the discussion sections that keep Yale College running. A union drive is on. Organizers work the libraries and the coffee lines. One of them is a psychology student named John Jost (b. 1968), and he keeps hitting the same wall. The students he approaches are the losers in the arrangement. They know it. Many of them say so. And still they hesitate. Some fear retaliation. Some identify with the professors above them and the institution around them. Some explain that the low pay must serve some purpose, that this is how apprenticeship works, that the system, whatever its faults, is basically sound.

Jost lost the argument more often than he won it. Most organizers file that experience under frustration. He filed it under data. If people will defend an arrangement that pays them poverty wages, and defend it to the face of someone offering a way out, then something is at work that theories of self-interest cannot reach. He spent the next thirty years naming it, measuring it, and defending the name against people who think it explains too much.

The name is system justification, and it made Jost the most cited and most contested political psychologist of his generation. As of 2026 he is Professor of Psychology and Politics at New York University, with affiliations in sociology and data science, director of the Social Justice Lab, co-director of NYU's Center for Social and Political Behavior, editor of Oxford University Press's political psychology series, and founding chief editor of Frontiers in Social Psychology. The honors run long: three Gordon Allport Intergroup Relations Prizes, the Kurt Lewin Award, honorary doctorates in Buenos Aires and Budapest, the presidency of the International Society of Political Psychology. The controversy runs just as long, because Jost has spent his career arguing two claims that many colleagues accept only one at a time: that people of every station are psychologically drawn to legitimate the order they live under, and that the political right and left are not mirror images of each other.

He came to the first claim through his childhood.

Jost was born in Toronto in 1968 while his father, Lawrence Jost, finished a philosophy degree at the University of Toronto. The family came from Rochester, New York, and settled in Cincinnati, where Lawrence taught ancient Greek philosophy at the University of Cincinnati and also taught Karl Marx (1818-1883). Jost's mother, Jean Effinger Jost, earned a doctorate in English and taught medieval literature at Bradley University. The house held Aristotle, Chaucer, and Capital. Jost has said the Nixon administration kept a file on his father because of the Marx courses. No documents have surfaced to confirm this, so it stands as family memory rather than established record, but the belief itself shaped the boy. He grew up in a liberal enclave inside a conservative city, aware early that institutions decide which ideas count as dangerous.

He attended Walnut Hills High School, Cincinnati's selective classical public school, the kind of place where the smart children of professors compete with the smart children of everyone else. By thirteen or fourteen he had decided on psychology. The first motive was clinical and close to home: a relative suffered from serious mental illness, and Jost wanted the tools to help. In college the ambition rotated ninety degrees. Fitting broken people back into intact institutions began to seem like half the problem. What if the institutions were doing some of the breaking? That rotation, from repairing the person to interrogating the system, became the axis of everything he later wrote.

He finished Duke in three years, Phi Beta Kappa, magna cum laude, with a thesis on group polarization. A summer in London in 1988 introduced him to European social psychology and social identity theory, the British tradition that treats group membership as the engine of social perception. Then he did something unusual for an ambitious young psychologist. Admitted to Yale University's doctoral program, he deferred and spent two years studying philosophy at the University of Cincinnati as a Charles Phelps Taft Fellow, writing a master's thesis on Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) and the acquisition of mental-state concepts.

The detour explains the vocabulary. Most experimental psychologists use words like ideology, legitimacy, and false consciousness the way tourists use a phrasebook. Jost inherited them from the traditions that coined them: Marx, Max Weber (1864-1920), Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), Karl Mannheim (1893-1947), the Frankfurt School, and behind them all Étienne de La Boétie (1530-1563), the sixteenth-century Frenchman who asked why millions obey one man who could not compel a hundred of them. The question of voluntary servitude is five centuries old. Jost's bet was that it could be dragged into the laboratory without dying on the table.

At Yale, beginning in 1990, he found the collaborator who made the bet possible. Mahzarin Banaji (b. 1956) was then building, with Anthony Greenwald, the research program on implicit social cognition that later produced the Implicit Association Test. The core finding was that people carry associations they do not endorse. A subject can sincerely reject racial hierarchy on a questionnaire and still show automatic preferences that track it. For a student steeped in Gramsci, the implication was electric: if attitudes live below the level of avowal, then ideology can too, and the study of political consciousness can no longer stop at what people say they believe.

Jost also absorbed William J. McGuire (1925-2007), his dissertation adviser, who preached what he called perspectivism: every theory is right about something, and the researcher's job is to find the conditions under which each holds, rather than to stage a tournament with one permanent winner. Leonard Doob (1909-2000) and Robert Abelson (1928-2005) rounded out the training. The formation shows in Jost's mature style, which absorbs rival theories rather than demolishing them.

The founding document came out of a seminar paper. In a course on stereotyping and prejudice, Jost argued that stereotypes do more than simplify the world or flatter the groups that hold them. They explain hierarchy. They convert an arrangement of power into a story about traits. Banaji saw what the paper was and pushed it toward publication. "The Role of Stereotyping in System-Justification and the Production of False Consciousness" appeared in the British Journal of Social Psychology in 1994. Jost was twenty-five.

The paper opened with an inventory of anomalies. The reigning theories held that people justify themselves (ego justification) and their groups (group justification). Yet the literature was full of disadvantaged people doing neither: accepting unflattering stereotypes of their own kind, preferring higher-status outgroups, asking less pay for the same work, blessing the arrangements that held them down. Jost and Banaji proposed a third motive. People want to see the overarching system as fair, legitimate, and necessary, and this want can operate against their personal and group interests. They gave the old Marxist term false consciousness an operational afterlife: consciousness that serves the system at the expense of the self.

The theory, as it developed over the next three decades, rests on a simple account of why the motive exists. Legitimacy pays, psychologically, in three currencies. It pays in certainty: a justified world is a predictable world, and institutions supply the categories through which life makes sense. It pays in safety: a legitimate order feels less dangerous than an arbitrary or collapsing one. And it pays in belonging: to reject the arrangements everyone around you accepts is to risk losing shared reality with your family, your congregation, your workplace. Epistemic, existential, relational. When those needs run high, through threat, dependence, or the absence of any credible alternative, the defense of the status quo runs high with them.

Read that way, system justification is an accommodation to dependence rather than a failure of intelligence. A man can see that the company treats him badly and still need the job, distrust the union, fear the disruption, and doubt that anything better exists. The theory's claim is that on top of these calculations sits a motivated push to go further, to conclude that the arrangement is fair, so that the dependence stops hurting.

The most elegant demonstrations involve stereotypes that flatter both sides of a hierarchy. With Aaron Kay, Jost showed that exposing people to the figure of the poor-but-happy or poor-but-honest man increased their belief that society is just. Every rank gets a compensating virtue. The rich are competent but cold; the poor are warm but unsuccessful; men command but cannot feel; women feel but cannot command. The ledger balances and the hierarchy stands. The same logic runs through benevolent sexism, the affectionate register that praises women as pure, delicate, and deserving of protection, and thereby writes them out of authority. The compliment does the work of the insult. Jost's studies of depressed entitlement extended the point to wages: members of lower-status groups can come to regard less as their due, so the discrimination completes itself from the inside.

Then there are the system-threat experiments. Tell participants their country is declining, their economy failing, their social order under attack, and watch what happens. The naive prediction says criticism erodes allegiance. Often the opposite occurs: threat activates defense, and people cling harder to the arrangement under indictment, reaching for the stereotypes that justify it. The effect is conditional, and Jost is careful about the conditions. People do revolt, emigrate, and withdraw legitimacy, especially when an alternative looks viable. But the finding explains a pattern every failed reformer knows: the exposé that was supposed to shatter faith in the institution somehow deepened it. A movement that offers only demolition strengthens the walls. Durable change needs an offer of continuity, safety, and belonging to compete with the ones the old order already makes.

Jost took the theory to the University of Maryland after his 1995 doctorate, where Arie Kruglanski (b. 1939) supplied the motivational machinery. Kruglanski's need for cognitive closure, the hunger for a firm answer and an end to ambiguity, gave Jost a measurable variable connecting personality to politics. Then came a move rich in irony: in 1997 the man theorizing why workers accept their wages joined the faculty of the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Picture the seminar room. Future consultants and venture capitalists, the least falsely conscious people in America, taking a required course in organizational behavior from a scholar of false consciousness. Jost taught negotiation, teamwork, and social influence, and he watched hierarchy in its natural habitat. A corporation is a legitimacy engine: salaries, titles, promotion tracks, and an official ideology of merit, all consumed daily by people who depend on it. He has said the business school taught him how legitimation looks from above. With Brenda Major he convened the interdisciplinary project that became The Psychology of Legitimacy (2001), built on the premise that durable power runs on consent, coercion being too expensive to hold anything together for long.

The move to NYU in 2003, after a fellowship year at Harvard's Radcliffe Institute, gave Jost a chance to run his theory on himself, and he took it. Staying at Stanford required nothing. Leaving meant risk, disruption, a family move across the country. He has described consciously correcting for the inertia that favors the existing arrangement, in his life as in his subjects'. He and the clinical psychologist Orsolya Hunyady, Hungarian-born, whom he married in 2001, moved to New York with what became a family of four. The Hungarian connection later deepened into a scholarly one, with collaborations at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, which gave him an honorary doctorate in 2021. With Hunyady he developed the concept that may be the theory's emotional center: the palliative function of ideology. Believing the world is fair feels good. It quiets anger, guilt, and dread. For the winner it aligns success with justice. For the loser it trades long-term interest for short-term peace. Ideology, on this account, is a drug the society administers to itself, and like most drugs it works.

By then Jost had detonated his second bomb. "Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition," written with Jack Glaser, Kruglanski, and Frank Sulloway (b. 1947), appeared in Psychological Bulletin in 2003. The paper synthesized decades of research into a claim of elective affinity: needs for certainty, order, and threat management make the ideas of the right, tradition, hierarchy, authority, the sanctity of the existing, more psychologically attractive to the people who have those needs in higher degree. Two dimensions define conservatism in the model, resistance to change and acceptance of inequality, and they can come apart: the religious traditionalist who wants redistribution, the libertarian who welcomes disruption and shrugs at the Gini coefficient.

The press coverage flattened the argument into "scientists say conservatives are scared and rigid," and the reaction was loud. Columnists mocked the study, a Guardian headline announced that a study of Bush's psyche had touched a nerve, and members of Congress questioned the federal grants behind it. Critics inside the discipline raised the serious version of the objection: if you define conservatism as attachment to hierarchy and resistance to change, and then find that it correlates with need for order, you may have discovered your own definitions. And what of the left's rigidities, the Stalinists and the campus enforcers? Jost's standing answer became the fulcrum of the rest of his career: rigidity on both sides is possible; symmetry is an empirical question; and a science that assumes the answer before looking is doing etiquette rather than research.

The question came to a head in a hotel ballroom in San Antonio in January 2011. Jonathan Haidt (b. 1963), addressing roughly a thousand colleagues at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, asked for a show of hands. Liberals? A forest of arms, the great majority of the room. Centrists and libertarians? A few dozen. Conservatives? Three hands. Haidt called the field a tribal moral community, argued that its politics distorted its science, and proposed affirmative action for conservative scholars. The room laughed at the jokes and shifted in its seats at the rest, and the New York Times gave the talk a column. From where Jost sat, the diagnosis had the causation backward. A scientist's demographic identity does not determine the truth of a finding; methods do. Testable hypotheses, defensible measures, transparent analysis, replication: these are the discipline's immune system, and they work, when they work, regardless of who votes for whom. Ideological diversity might catch some errors, he allowed, but treating the researcher's politics as the measure of the research is itself a corruption of standards. Neither man has moved much in fifteen years, and the argument has never been settled, because both premises are true: values do steer questions, and methods do check answers, and the ratio between the two varies from study to study.

Meanwhile the theory kept colonizing new territory. With Irina Feygina and Rachel Goldsmith, Jost showed that system-justifying attitudes predict denial and minimization of environmental problems. The finding reframes climate denial as system defense: the diagnosis indicts the industrial economy and the way of life built on it, so rejecting the diagnosis protects the legitimacy of both. The same studies located the workaround. When environmental action was framed as patriotic, as protecting the American way of life, as system-sanctioned change, resistance softened. Reform sells as fulfillment; it stalls as repudiation. Jost later joined the international megastudies testing climate messages across dozens of countries, part of the field's post-replication-crisis turn toward large samples, preregistration, and head-to-head comparison of interventions. A 2024 megastudy in Science, with over 32,000 participants and 25 treatments, found that partisan animosity can be reduced, though a treatment that warms feelings toward the other side does not automatically strengthen commitment to democratic rules. The two problems are related and separate.

The work on collective action closed the circle that opened in New Haven. System justification, across many studies, predicts reduced moral outrage, and outrage is the fuel of protest. Before people act, they must judge their condition illegitimate, assign a cause, imagine an alternative, believe action can succeed, and find others who see the same reality. The theory maps the threshold a movement must cross, and explains why the phrase "voting against their interests" explains so little. Interests are plural. People vote to protect their families, their churches, their standing, their sense of order, and their picture of the world, and the material interest competes with the rest.

There were excursions into the brain. With David Amodio, Jost examined neurocognitive correlates of ideology, conflict monitoring, and responses to novelty; other studies linked political attitudes to brain structure. The press loved the liberal brain and the conservative brain. Jost's own position is more modest: neural correlates prove nothing about innateness, brains develop through experience, some of the early studies were small, and the theory stands or falls on behavioral evidence, with neuroscience as one added level of description. There was also the computational turn. At NYU his lab moved into social media at scale, and one prominent finding entered the general vocabulary: moral-emotional language accelerates the spread of political messages within ideological networks. Outrage travels. Digital platforms turn out to be legitimacy machines too, sites where shared reality is built, allies identified, boundaries policed, and institutions blessed or damned, at a volume of millions of posts rather than dozens of undergraduates.

The synthesis arrived in 2020. A Theory of System Justification, from Harvard University Press, gathered twenty-five years of evidence and set the theory in the lineage of La Boétie: no order survives on coercion alone; it survives because enough of its inhabitants reproduce it in thought. The book also concedes the theory's hardest internal problem. Modern societies are systems of systems. A man can defend the nation and despise the government, defend capitalism and hate the corporations, defend democracy and reject an election. Which system is being justified, by whom, and when, is a question the theory must answer case by case, and its critics doubt it always can. The following year came Left and Right: The Psychological Significance of a Political Distinction, which defended the old spectrum against the recurring announcement of its death. Movements scramble positions, Jost concedes, but the underlying conflict persists: equality against hierarchy, change against preservation. The book won the International Society of Political Psychology's outstanding book award in 2022.

The criticisms deserve their own accounting, because they are serious and Jost has had to live with them. The sharpest comes from the social identity tradition he trained beside. Chuma Owuamalam, Mark Rubin, Russell Spears, and Luca Caricati argue that no separate system-justifying motive is needed. A poor man who defends the nation may identify with the nation, a group like any other, just larger. He may expect to rise. He may judge, reasonably, that the alternatives on offer are worse. If identity and hope and prudence explain the data, the extra motive is furniture. Beneath this runs the falsifiability worry: a theory that can read both submission and rebellion as consistent with itself explains everything and therefore nothing. Jost's defense is that the theory makes conditional predictions, defense rising with threat, dependence, and inescapability, falling when alternatives appear, and that these have held across methods and countries. A second wound was partly self-inflicted. Early formulations of the status-legitimacy hypothesis suggested the disadvantaged might justify the system most strongly. The evidence usually shows the opposite, since the privileged have better reasons to call the game fair. Jost's mature position asks for less: some disadvantaged people defend the system despite the cost to self and group, those cases are real, and they need explaining. True, and less dramatic than the theory's reputation. Add the field-wide problems, student samples, self-report, scales that may overlap with the outcomes they predict, contested implicit measures, and the fair summary is that the theory's strength lies in convergence. No single study carries it. The accumulated weight, across surveys, experiments, representative samples, and thirty years, does.

The last decade has made Jost's politics harder to bracket, because he stopped bracketing them. In 2024, with Débora de Oliveira Santos, he published a nationally representative survey of 1,557 American adults in Communications Psychology. Conservatives expressed less support for political equality and legal guarantees and more willingness to defect from democratic rules and vote for anti-democratic candidates, differences partly mediated by right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation. The study contained a twist that complicates any cartoon of the author: political system justification, on which conservatives scored higher, predicted support for free speech and cut against anti-democratic tendencies. Defending an existing system protects its rules, and when the system is a liberal democracy, the conservative reflex conserves it. System justification is an engine without a fixed destination; what it defends depends on what stands.

The same year he delivered his Kurt Lewin Award address and published it as "Both-Sideology Endangers Democracy and Social Science" in the Journal of Social Issues, sixty-five pages of the least hedged prose of his career. The reflex that treats left and right as equally prejudiced, equally violent, equally lax about democratic norms is, he argued, false on the evidence and dangerous in effect, a professional politeness that blinds the discipline to a historically particular threat. He invoked Kurt Lewin (1890-1947), the refugee from Nazi Germany who founded the field's engaged tradition and rejected moral relativism, and claimed that legacy for the present. The address states the evidence for asymmetry; it also raises the stakes of being wrong. A scholar who names one political tendency as the greater danger has narrowed the distance between analysis and advocacy to a line, and his critics, some of whom accuse him of embodying the politicized science Haidt warned about, patrol that line without rest. Jost's answer has not changed: symmetry is a finding, not an assumption, and pretending the evidence is evenly distributed is its own form of bias.

In February 2026 came a paper that returned him, after forty years, to the relative whose illness first drew him to psychology. With Jussi Valtonen and Flávio Azevedo, in American Psychologist, he reported three studies, including a nationally representative sample, showing that economic system justification was the strongest and most consistent predictor of mental illness stigma, and that mentally ill characters were stigmatized more when depicted as poor. The logic completes itself. If the economy is fair, outcomes reflect character, and the man who cannot function is not sick or unlucky. He has failed, and failure invites blame rather than care. The stigma that public campaigns cannot dent turns out to be load-bearing: it holds up a picture of the economy. The boy who wanted to help one suffering relative ended by arguing that the suffering was, in part, an output of the story his country tells about success.

What does the whole career amount to? Strip the apparatus and the claim is old and strong. Domination is a problem of meaning before it is a problem of force. An order survives when its outcomes seem deserved, its categories seem natural, and its alternatives seem worse, and human beings, needing certainty, safety, and company in their beliefs, are recruited into supplying that seeming, sometimes against themselves. Jost's achievement was to take this from the philosophers who asserted it and give it hypotheses, measures, boundary conditions, and a body count of studies. The theory's weakness, its elasticity across the many systems a modern person inhabits, is the shadow of its scope, and his recent work, tying defense to particular systems in particular moments, is the repair in progress.

The practical lesson runs in both directions across the political spectrum, which may be why readers of every persuasion find something usable in it. To the reformer it says: your exposé is not enough, and may backfire; offer continuity, belonging, and a future that feels safer than the present, or lose to an unjust order that offers all three. To the conservative it says: the loyalty you feel toward inherited arrangements is a human need meeting a human institution, and the same loyalty, in a decent system, is what holds the constitutional floor when partisans start prying at the boards. And to everyone it says that the feeling of living in a fair world is a product, manufactured daily, purchased with attention and repetition, and worth auditing from time to time against the world itself. The graduate students in New Haven who would not sign the card were not fools. They were paying for certainty, safety, and company in the only currency they had. The whole career is a receipt.

Notes

The 2024 Santos study is in Communications Psychology (N=1,557, published July 2, 2024). “Both-Sideology Endangers Democracy and Social Science” is Journal of Social Issues 80(3), pp. 1138-1203, and it was his Kurt Lewin Award address, hence “sixty-five pages.” The mental illness stigma paper, Valtonen, Azevedo, Jost, three studies, total N=1,514, poor characters stigmatized more, appeared in American Psychologist, February 2026. The 2024 Science megastudy had 32,059 participants and 25 treatments.

Scenes and what supports them. The San Antonio scene is the best documented: Haidt‘s SPSP talk, January 2011, roughly a thousand attendees, three conservative hands, covered by John Tierney in the NYT, “Social Scientist Sees Bias Within,” February 7, 2011. The hand counts and “tribal moral community” phrase are from that coverage and Haidt’s published talk; the room’s reactions, laughter, shifting in seats, are my extrapolation. The New Haven opening scene rests on Jost‘s own accounts that his interest partly came from a failed effort to organize graduate students at Yale; the food-assistance detail and specific organizing encounters are extrapolation from the documented conditions of the GESO drives of that era. The Guardian headline on the 2003 flap is real: “Study of Bush’s psyche touches a nerve,” August 13, 2003. Congressional criticism of the NSF/NIH grants behind the 2003 paper is documented; Reps. Sam Johnson and others raised it publicly.

Extrapolations without links, flagged. The Stanford seminar-room scene, MBA students, required organizational behavior course, extrapolates from his documented GSB appointment and teaching areas. “The house held Aristotle, Chaucer, and Capital” compresses his parents’ documented specialties..

Google Scholar shows him well past 150,000 citations.

I did not invent dialogue. The Haidt scene carries the dialogue function through the hand-count. See Tierney’s piece and Jost’s SPSP blog response, “Debunking Both-Sideology for the Sake of Democracy and Social Science”.

Jost and Mannheim’s Paradox

In April 1933 the new German government dismissed Karl Mannheim from his chair in sociology at Frankfurt. He had held it for three years. He was Hungarian, Jewish, and the author of Ideology and Utopia (1929), the book that argued all political thought is bound to the social position of the thinker. The regime that expelled him did not read him. It did not need to. It confirmed him. A movement built on total ideology, on the claim that truth itself is racial and positional, drove out the man who had diagnosed positional thinking, and it drove him out for his position. He went to the London School of Economics and spent the rest of his life, until his death in 1947, trying to answer the question his own book had made unavoidable: if all social thought is situated, on what ground does the diagnostician stand?

That question is the deep structure of John Jost's career, and Jost knows it. His vocabulary is Mannheim's inheritance. Ideology, legitimation, false consciousness, the social determination of belief: these terms passed from Marx through Mannheim's generation into the sociology of knowledge, and from there, through Jost's two years of philosophy in Cincinnati and his seminar papers at Yale, into the psychology laboratory. System justification theory is what Mannheim's central concept looks like after it has been converted into scales, manipulations, and nationally representative samples. And Jost's late career, the asymmetry research and the both-sideology polemic above all, is a sustained attempt to answer Mannheim's paradox: to show that a science of ideology can be conducted by an ideological animal without collapsing into one more ideology. Whether the attempt succeeds is the question this essay tries to hold open long enough to examine.

Begin with what Mannheim claimed. He distinguished two conceptions of ideology. The particular conception is the everyday accusation: my opponent lies, shades, and rationalizes because it pays him to. This conception leaves the accuser's own thought untouched. The total conception goes further: my opponent's entire mode of thought, his categories, his sense of what counts as evidence, his picture of the world, arises from his social location. Marxism wielded the total conception against the bourgeoisie while exempting the proletariat and its theorists. Mannheim took the step Marxism refused. He generalized the total conception. Turn it on everyone, including yourself. Once you do, no political thought escapes situation. The conservative's traditionalism, the liberal's proceduralism, the socialist's theory of history, and the sociologist's theory of all of the above are each thought from somewhere, by someone, whose somewhere shapes the thinking.

This is Mannheim's paradox, though he did not call it that. The sociology of knowledge is itself knowledge. If social position determines thought, the determination applies to the sentence stating it. The doctrine seems to eat itself, and generations of critics have said so.

Mannheim proposed two ways out, and Jost's career leans on descendants of both.

The first was relationism, which Mannheim insisted was not relativism. That perspectives are partial does not make them equal. Perspectives can be compared, checked against one another, and combined. A claim tied to a position can still be more or less adequate to its object, and the observer who understands the positional origins of competing views gains rather than loses the capacity to judge among them. Truth in social matters is perspectival the way vision is perspectival: every view is from an angle, and some angles see more, and several angles together see most of all.

The second way out was a social carrier for relationism. Mannheim borrowed a phrase from Alfred Weber (1868-1958), the freischwebende Intelligenz, the free-floating intelligentsia. Intellectuals, recruited from many classes and bound tightly to none, educated into rival traditions, might synthesize where partisans can only assert. They are not above society. They are loosely enough attached that the perspectives fighting below can meet in their heads. Mannheim's hope was that this stratum could produce, if never a view from nowhere, then at least a view from many somewheres, disciplined into coherence.

Now set Jost beside the framework, piece by piece.

System justification theory is the total conception of ideology built into an instrument. Mannheim defined ideology, as against utopia, by function: ideological thought stabilizes the existing order, utopian thought strains to burst it. Jost's theory measures the stabilizing function. The palliative effect of believing the world is fair, the poor-but-happy stereotype that balances the moral ledger of inequality, the depressed wage entitlement of subordinated groups, the surge of system defense under threat: each is a psychological account of how thought performs the work Mannheim assigned to ideology. The 1994 paper with Mahzarin Banaji cited the Frankfurt lineage and the concept of false consciousness by name. Where Mannheim had to reconstruct the social determination of belief from texts and historical cases, Jost could randomize it, prime it, and put confidence intervals on it. That is a genuine advance, and a Mannheimian would say so. It is also a narrowing. Mannheim's ideologies were whole styles of thought, conservative, liberal, socialist, each with its own conception of time, freedom, and reason. Jost's system justification is a single motive, scaled from one to nine. The laboratory paid for its precision with the wholeness of the thing described.

The paradox arrives on schedule, and it arrived in a hotel ballroom. When Jonathan Haidt stood before the assembled discipline in San Antonio in 2011 and counted three conservatives in a thousand chairs, he was performing the general total conception of ideology on social psychology itself. Your discipline is a thought-community, he was saying. Your sense of which questions matter, which findings feel right, which conclusions get waved through review, arises from your shared position. The sociology of knowledge had come home. And the discipline's leading theorist of ideology, sitting in that community, was the natural addressee, because his research program had spent two decades explaining conservatism as motivated cognition, need for order, threat sensitivity, resistance to change, from within a community with almost no conservatives in it to talk back.

Jost's reply, maintained across fifteen years, is that method is the answer to position. A finding is not refuted by the politics of the person who found it. Hypotheses can be tested by anyone, measures inspected by anyone, analyses rerun by anyone. Replication does not check your voter registration. The demand that the discipline diversify its politics mistakes the sociology of the field for the epistemology of its claims. Science, on this account, is the exit from Mannheim's paradox: a set of procedures that launders situated hunches into unsituated knowledge.

Mannheim considered that exit and allowed it only part way. He exempted mathematics and natural science from existential determination. Two plus two is not bourgeois. But social and political thought he refused to exempt, because there the categories themselves, before any measurement begins, carry position. And political psychology lives on the contested line between the two. A reaction-time measure is on the thermometer side of the line. But what of a scale for right-wing authoritarianism, whose items were written by researchers, whose name attaches pathology to one side of politics, and which has no twin of equal age and refinement on the left? What of the 2003 paper's twin definitions of conservatism, resistance to change and acceptance of inequality, which critics said built the conclusions into the coordinates? Jost has serious answers to each objection, and the answers are themselves research. But the objections are Mannheim's point in modern dress: the evaluative act hides upstream of the data, in the construction of the instrument, where method does not reach because method presupposes it. The exit Jost claims exists for the testing of claims. Mannheim denies it exists for the framing of them.

Both-sideology sharpens the case to its finest point. Jost's argument is that symmetry between left and right, in prejudice, in violence, in fidelity to democratic norms, is an empirical question, and that the evidence returns an asymmetric answer, and that a discipline which assumes symmetry out of politeness has substituted etiquette for inquiry. Read through Mannheim, the argument is stronger than Jost's critics allow and weaker than Jost allows. Stronger, because relationism licenses judgment. Mannheim never taught that all perspectives are equally adequate, and a social science forbidden to find asymmetries would be forbidden to find anything. The insistence that situated observers can still rank claims by evidence is Mannheim's own insistence. Weaker, because the finding of asymmetry depends on which behaviors were selected for counting, whose norms define defection, and which historical window frames the tally, and each selection is made by a scholar standing somewhere. Jost measures defection from the liberal-democratic rules of the game. A scholar standing elsewhere might count institutional capture, or speech suppression, or the quiet coercions of administrative power, and return a different ledger. The reply that those counts can be run too, and should be, is correct, and it concedes the Mannheimian premise: no single count is the view from nowhere, and the adequacy of the picture depends on how many angles get counted.

Here the essay must turn and look at its subject's formation, because Jost is himself a specimen of the stratum Mannheim nominated for the synthesizing role. Consider the profile. A professor's son from a house that held ancient philosophy and medieval literature and Marx. A detour into philosophy before the laboratory. Training under William J. McGuire, whose perspectivism, every theory true somewhere, the researcher's task to map the somewheres, is relationism translated into experimental practice. A career built on absorbing rival theories, social identity, cognitive dissonance, just-world belief, terror management, into a framework that assigns each its conditions. A business school appointment that gave him three years inside the thought-world of the dominant class he theorizes. Even the marriage joins perspectives: an American psychologist and a Hungarian clinician, Budapest and New York, and Mannheim's own trajectory ran Budapest to the Anglophone world. If the free-floating intelligentsia has a living exemplar in American social science, Jost has the credentials.

And yet Jost has declared a side, in print, with force, and here the frame springs its best surprise, because Mannheim did too. The Mannheim of 1929 stood on the balcony above the fighting perspectives. The Mannheim of wartime London came down. In Diagnosis of Our Time (1943) he called for militant democracy, a democratic order that plans, teaches values, and defends itself against the movements that destroyed his Germany, and he no longer wrote as if the synthesizer could stay unattached while the house burned. Exile taught him what the balcony costs. Jost's both-sideology address, with its invocation of Kurt Lewin the refugee and its warning that false balance endangers democracy itself, recapitulates Mannheim's arc: the theorist of situated knowledge, confronted with a movement he judges anti-democratic, decides that detachment has become a position too, and the most dishonest one available. Whether the judgment is right is a question about evidence. That the arc is the same is a fact about the tradition. The sociology of knowledge has twice produced its own refutation of neutrality, and both times under the pressure of the same fear.

So does the exit exist? The honest answer the frame yields is: partly, and not where Jost points. Method is real. It disciplines situated thinkers, catches some of their errors, and forces their claims into forms that opponents can attack. Jost's findings are not dissolved by his politics, and the demand that they be dismissed on demographic grounds is the particular conception of ideology wearing a lab coat. But method operates downstream of framing, and framing is where position lives, and no procedure yet devised desituates the framer. Mannheim's actual solution was never a procedure. It was an ecology: enough perspectives, in enough contact, with enough discipline, that the partialities collide and grind against each other and something rounder emerges. On that account, the answer to the paradox is not a standpoint but a fight, sustained and rule-governed, among observers who see from different angles and cannot exempt themselves.

Which returns, in the end, to the three hands in San Antonio. Jost has argued for fifteen years that the discipline's political monoculture does not invalidate its findings, and within the logic of testing he is right. Within the logic of framing, the monoculture is a missing instrument. The conservative colleagues who might have written the rival scales, run the rival counts, and framed the rival hypotheses are the absent angles in the ecology, and their absence weakens the very asymmetry claims Jost most wants to secure, because a count conducted from one side of the room, however rigorous, invites the total conception of ideology as a reply, and the reply now writes itself. Mannheim's paradox was never that situated science is impossible. It is that situated science earns its authority only in the collision of situations, and a field that has lost half its collisions is running the synthesis with one hemisphere. Jost, the most Mannheimian psychologist alive, has staked his late career on the claim that evidence can settle what perspective disputes. Mannheim's reply, from the far side of one exile and two catastrophes, might be that evidence settles disputes only inside an ecology of perspectives, and that the theorist of system justification, of all people, should ask what happens to the thought of a community that has made one perspective the system.

Notes

Dismissed from Frankfurt in April 1933 under the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service; he had held the chair since 1930; emigrated to the LSE; died in London January 9, 1947. Standard sources: Karl Mannheim and the Stanford Encyclopedia entry on the sociology of knowledge tradition. Ideology and Utopia first appeared in German in 1929; the expanded English translation, by Wirth and Shils, came in 1936. The particular/total distinction, relationism vs. relativism, and the ideology/utopia functional definitions are all from that book. The phrase freischwebende Intelligenz originates with Alfred Weber; Mannheim’s adoption of it is documented in Ideology and Utopia, Part III. “Militant democracy” appears in Mannheim’s Diagnosis of Our Time (1943); the term was coined earlier by Karl Loewenstein in 1937.

Jost and the Convenient Belief

In 2023 the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues gave John Jost its highest honor, the Kurt Lewin Award, and Jost used the award address to tell the assembled discipline that its political monoculture posed no serious threat to its science. The published version, “Both-Sideology Endangers Democracy and Social Science,” runs sixty-five pages in the Journal of Social Issues, with an admiring introduction by Mahzarin Banaji. The argument: claims that left and right are equally prejudiced, equally violent, and equally lax about democracy are false or misleading, one by one, on the evidence. The setting: a field that surveys itself at ratios approaching eighty liberals for every conservative, honoring a career built on the finding that the conservative mind runs on fear, rigidity, and the defense of hierarchy. The room applauded. Award audiences do. But hold the scene still for a moment. A professional community handed its top prize to a lecture assuring that community that its one glaring compositional fact carries no epistemic cost, and that the side almost none of its members belong to is the side that endangers democracy.

Stephen P. Turner (b. 1951) has spent a career explaining scenes like this one, and the explanation requires no villains. Expert communities are self-certifying. The public cannot check their claims; only members can, and membership is acquired through training, hiring, funding, and review, each administered by existing members. Inside such a community, beliefs are not selected by deception. They are selected by cost. A belief that smooths a career, flatters the group, and offends no one who controls a resource gets held, cited, taught, and awarded. A belief that threatens the community's self-understanding gets scrutinized to death, and the scrutiny feels, from inside, like rigor. Nobody lies. The incentive structure does the believing, and the individual experiences the result as his own honest judgment. Call the output a convenient belief: one whose holder pays nothing to hold it and something to drop it, and whose truth the community's own machinery is poorly built to test.

The asymmetry thesis is the convenient belief of American social psychology, and Jost is its most credentialed holder. Consider what it delivers. It tells a left-leaning discipline that its politics and its science point the same direction. It converts the field's compositional embarrassment from a liability into an irrelevance: the monoculture cannot bias the findings, because the findings survive method, and method is politically blind. It supplies, in the rigidity-of-the-right literature, a scientific account of why the missing conservatives are missing that requires no institutional self-examination: they lack the openness the work requires. And it licenses the discipline's members to carry their politics into public with the authority of their credentials, since on this account the politics are downstream of the evidence rather than upstream of it. Every one of those payments flows to the people doing the research. That is the structure of convenience, and it is visible from space.

Jost knows this, which distinguishes him from most holders of convenient beliefs and makes him the more instructive case. He has stated the objection himself, in nearly the terms above, and answered it: convenience does not make a belief false. He is right, and the point is elementary. The genetic fallacy cuts both ways; a claim is not refuted by the interests of the claimant, or every belief of every interested party would fall, including the belief that interested parties cannot be trusted. If the evidence shows asymmetry, the fact that the finding pleases the finders changes nothing about the evidence.

Turner's frame accepts the logic and relocates the question. The issue is never whether convenience proves falsehood. The issue is what testing machinery the belief faces, because a community cannot tell, from inside, the difference between a convenient truth and a convenient error. Both feel identical. Both survive internal review, because internal review is staffed by people for whom the belief is convenient. The only way to know which one you are holding is to expose the belief to people who pay a price for agreeing with you and profit from proving you wrong, and then see what survives. So the Turner question about Jost is concrete: what does the ledger of inconvenient findings look like, and how has he handled it?

The ledger has real entries. In 2022, Thomas Costello, Scott Lilienfeld (1960-2020), and colleagues published a psychometric case that left-wing authoritarianism is a coherent, measurable, and consequential construct, after decades in which the field had treated it as a myth; the paper became the most cited article the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology published that year, which suggests a hunger the discipline had not been feeding. In 2023 came the meta-analysis: Costello, Shauna Bowes, Ariel Malka, and colleagues pooled 708 effect sizes from 187,612 participants and found the rigidity-conservatism relationship heterogeneous to the point of instability, robust for social conservatism, small and inconsistent for economic conservatism outside the United States, and inflated in past work by criterion contamination and unrepresentative sampling. In 2020, a team led by Bert Bakker and Gijs Schumacher failed to replicate the famous physiological findings, publishing evidence that conservatives and liberals show similar bodily responses to threat; the startle-reflex literature that had put the fearful conservative amygdala into a thousand news stories did not survive contact with larger samples. And Mark Brandt and Jarret Crawford spent a decade showing that prejudice against ideological opponents runs symmetric: liberals and conservatives dislike the other side's groups at comparable strength, each side merely selects different targets.

None of this demolishes Jost's position, and honesty requires saying so. Social conservatism does correlate with rigidity measures in the meta-analysis he might otherwise fear. The LWA construct exists, and its existence does not establish that left and right authoritarianism are equal in prevalence or consequence in any given country in any given decade, which is the question Jost's democracy research addresses with behavioral and survey data of its own. The physiological failures wound a literature adjacent to his rather than the theory he built. A fair audit finds the asymmetry thesis damaged at the edges and standing at the center, for now, on the evidence available.

But watch how Jost handles the ledger, because the handling is where Turner's frame earns its keep. The both-sideology paper does not ignore the inconvenient literature; it prosecutes it. The LWA scale is dissected for validity problems. The symmetry findings are reframed. The pattern is consistent: findings congenial to the thesis are cited as evidence; findings inconvenient to it are cited as targets of methodological critique. Every scientist does some of this. The question is whether the critical energy is distributed by the quality of the studies or by the direction of their results, and that question cannot be answered by the man himself, because the distribution feels, from inside, like judgment. This is the sense in which there are truths Jost cannot afford. Not that he would suppress them. That his position prices them. A robust left-authoritarianism literature raises the cost of every sentence in the 2003 paper. A collapsed rigidity syndrome raises the cost of the framework that made his name. A field persuaded that its monoculture corrupts its framing devalues the entire inventory of a man whose findings the monoculture produced and rewarded. He can absorb any single entry on the ledger. He cannot cheaply absorb the ledger, and a mind in that position audits hostile evidence with a thoroughness it never applies to friendly evidence, while experiencing the difference as standards.

Now turn the frame around, because it turns, and Turner's whole point is that it turns. Viewpoint-diversity advocacy is convenient for its advocates, and the convenience is at least as legible. Heterodoxy in a crowded academic market is product differentiation: the eighty-first liberal social psychologist is inaudible, while the dissident commands op-ed pages, podcast invitations, donor networks, and book advances that orthodoxy never sees. Jonathan Haidt's career since San Antonio is the demonstration: the tribal-moral-community argument carried him out of the laboratory economy, where his empirical program had begun taking replication damage of its own, into a public-intellectual economy where the argument itself is the product and the customers are people who wanted academic psychology indicted. The Heterodox Academy runs on the claim that viewpoint diversity improves science, a claim its members test with roughly the vigor social psychologists apply to testing the asymmetry thesis, which is to say: the flagship belief of the reform movement is itself held conveniently, cited as self-evident, and rarely exposed to the possibility that ideologically mixed teams might produce not better science but stalemate, or that the missing conservatives might be missing partly for reasons other than discrimination. Both camps hold beliefs their positions pay them to hold. Both camps experience the holding as courage. The frame convicts neither and exempts neither; it says the two convictions cannot be adjudicated from inside either camp.

Which points at the machinery, and the machinery has started to exist. In 2026, Political Psychology published an adversarial collaboration on this exact battlefield: rigidity-of-the-right partisans, symmetry partisans, and rigidity-of-extremes partisans, including Philip Tetlock (b. 1954) among the adversaries, jointly preregistered two studies with more than six thousand participants, agreed on measures before seeing results, and published together. The finding was the kind adversarial work tends to produce: the answer depends on the question, on how rigidity is operationalized and which ideology dimension is measured, with each camp's hypothesis holding in some specifications and failing in others. Deflationary, unquotable, and worth more than a decade of dueling literatures, because every author paid in advance for the right to be believed. This is Turner's answer rendered as procedure. A convenient belief is laundered into knowledge only when its holder consents to a test designed by people who want him wrong, and the consent has to come before the data.

By that standard, the both-sideology address sits in an odd light. Its author's stated epistemology, method over membership, testable claims, transparent analysis, names exactly the machinery that could vindicate him, and the machinery now runs, and he is not conspicuous among its users. Jost debates his critics in print, at length, with skill, and print debate is the internal-review circuit where his advantages are maximal and the audience is the community for whom his conclusions are convenient. The harder venue, joint design with the Costellos and Malkas and Tetlocks before the results come in, is the one his own principles endorse and his position prices. Perhaps he will enter it; the man's appetite for combat is not in question. Until then, the Turner verdict is narrow and sufficient. The asymmetry thesis may well be true. The discipline that holds it cannot currently know that it knows, because the belief has been tested mainly by people it pays, in venues they control, against critics whose findings arrive pre-indicted. And the scholar who spent thirty years proving that human beings mistake the interests of their system for the structure of reality has produced, in his own career, the cleanest specimen the theory owns: a community defending the legitimacy of its arrangement, under threat, with rising confidence, and calling the defense evidence.

Notes

The rigidity meta-analysis: Costello, Bowes, Baldwin, Malka, Tasimi, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 124, pp. 1025-1052 (2023); the numbers in the essay, 708 effect sizes, N = 187,612, social vs. economic conservatism split, criterion contamination and sampling inflation, come from the abstract: PubMed. The LWA paper: Costello, Bowes, Stevens, Waldman, Tasimi, Lilienfeld (2022), JPSP, “Clarifying the Structure and Nature of Left-Wing Authoritarianism”; Costello’s own site claims it was the most cited JPSP article published in 2022. That claim is his, so you may want to soften to “among the most cited” if you can’t independently confirm. The adversarial collaboration: Bowes et al., Political Psychology 47, e70071 (2026), preregistered, total N = 6,181, adversaries including Tetlock and van Prooijen, with the “answer depends on the question” conclusion taken from the abstract: Wiley.

From knowledge, links to confirm. Bakker, Schumacher, Gothreau, Arceneaux, “Conservatives and Liberals Have Similar Physiological Responses to Threats,” Nature Human Behaviour (2020). Brandt and Crawford on symmetric ideological prejudice: their “ideological conflict hypothesis” program, summarized in Brandt et al., “The Ideological-Conflict Hypothesis,” Current Directions in Psychological Science (2014). Jost’s critique of the LWA scale and the symmetry literature is in the both-sideology paper itself. Banaji‘s introduction to the address: Wiley.

Extrapolations, flagged. “The room applauded. Award audiences do.” Self-evident extrapolation, marked as such in the text. The claim that Haidt‘s empirical program took replication damage refers to the moral foundations and social-intuitionist literatures, where measurement invariance and some disgust-priming findings have been contested; it is defensible but compressed, and it is the sentence a Haidt partisan will contest. The disgust-and-moral-judgment meta-analysis, Landy and Goodwin 2015, is the citable core. The characterization of Heterodox Academy‘s flagship claim as under-tested by its holders is my judgment; there is some supporting literature on ideological diversity and team performance either way, none decisive, which is the point, but it is argument rather than record.