The odd overlap of political left and right that’s associated with much of “neoliberal” social science

Merve Emre wrote this review on the twentieth anniversary of the book, Emotional Intelligence, and her review touched on a bunch of things I’ve been trying to say for awhile, in particular the odd overlap of political left and right that’s associated with much of “neoliberal” social science. (I put the term “neoliberal” in quotes because, like everybody else, I hate the expression but I’ll use it here for convenience.)

I first started to think about this political issue in the context of the business school professor and plagiarist Karl Weick. It struck me that Weick’s idea that “any map will do” combines some of the unappealing features of discourse on the political left and right. Associated with the left, there is a mindless all-things-are-possible-if-we-wish-hard-enough attitude, an embrace of unrealism and an anti-scientific attitude, magic words and jargon (“sensemaking”) in place of rigorous thought. Associated with the right, there is the principle of “leadership,” which seems to come down to giving comforting messages to bosses justifying their positions and telling them they should continue to act like they know what they’re doing at all times.

Here’s what Basbøll and I wrote in our article, “When Do Stories Work? Evidence and Illustration in the Social Sciences”:

We conclude with some comments on political ideology. Storytelling has been championed by a wide range of scholars who would like to escape the confines of rigor. On the academic left, storytelling is sometimes viewed as a humane alternative to the impersonal number crunching of economists, while the academic right uses stories to connect to worldly business executives who have neither the time nor patience for dry scholasticism. Karl Weick seems to us to express an unstable mix of these attitudes, championing the creative humanism of story-based social reasoning while offering his theories as useful truths for the business world.

Or as Emre puts it:

In pop psychology, such blindness is elevated to the first principle of craft, in a way that conceals the link between the psychological and the political. The genre’s preferred method of narration is the parable.

That’s interesting, as one of my themes with Basbøll is the distinction between what we call “stories,” which are real and immutable, with “parables,” which by being flexible allow any message to be drawn, and which correspondingly lack the immutability that would allow us to reject our preconceptions of the world. See discussion here in the context of the notorious “smallish town” example. You could say that the work of disgraced food researcher Brian Wansink is a series of parables: these articles exist to demonstrate pre-existing points that Wansink wanted to make; they did not provide new information that would help us learn or alter our theories of the world. That’s what happens when people take data or anecdotes and strain out all their fiber.

None of this is new, and similar things have been said about business-friendly happy talk back in the era of How to Win Friends and Influence People and The Power of Positive Thinking. The political implications of junk science is important enough that I think we should keep talking about it, so I appreciated Emre’s review, and I’d be interested in seeing takes on this topic from the political right as well.

P.S. I don’t know if I’d go all the way with Emre in her criticism of Emotional Intelligence—I’ve never read the book myself, but I do feel that the phrase, “emotional intelligence,” is useful in expressing the idea that there is this form of intelligence that’s different from logical problem-solving or whatever you want to call what’s usually called intelligence. So, without commenting on the book at all, let alone its various spin-offs which are amusingly discussed in Emre’s review, I like the introduction of that phrase into our discourse.