“Normative sociology": the study of what the causes of problems OUGHT to be

Extraordinary causal powers [are] being ascribed to “racism” — claims that far outstrip available evidence. [...] there is a clear moral stigma associated with questioning the causal connection being posited – which is perverse,

"Racism", a “politically correct” explanations for various social problems – where there’s no hard evidence that "racism" actually causes B

“politically correct” explanations for various social problems – where there’s no hard evidence that A actually causes B, but where people, for one reason or another, think that A ought to be the explanation for B. This can lead to a situation in which denying that A is the cause of B becomes morally stigmatized, and so people affirm the connection primarily because they feel obliged to, not because they’ve been persuaded by any evidence.

Postmodernism: Denial of Objective Reality and of Facts is Dishonest: Postmodernism could be a funny philosophical mind game. Teaching post- modernism as a serious realistic world view is utterly insincere, or ignorant. A well ...

Four reasons why people are attracted to normative sociology

1) they want to have a causal lever so they blame what they think they can change

2) they don’t want to blame or appear to blaming the victim; so they avoid some explanations in favor of others

3) confusing correlation and causation, on purpose

4) a metaphysical desire for bad things to have big and bad effects.

“Normative sociology": the study of what the causes of problems ought to be

The whole “normative sociology” concept has its origins in a joke that Robert Nozick made, in Anarchy, State and Utopia, where he claimed, in an offhand way, that “Normative sociology, the study of what the causes of problems ought to be, greatly fascinates us all”(247). Despite the casual manner in which he made the remark, the observation is an astute one. Often when we study social problems, there is an almost irresistible temptation to study what we would like the cause of those problems to be (for whatever reason), to the neglect of the actual causes. When this goes uncorrected, you can get the phenomenon of “politically correct” explanations for various social problems – where there’s no hard evidence that A actually causes B, but where people, for one reason or another, think that A ought to be the explanation for B. This can lead to a situation in which denying that A is the cause of B becomes morally stigmatized, and so people affirm the connection primarily because they feel obliged to, not because they’ve been persuaded by any evidence.

Let me give just one example, to get the juices flowing. I routinely hear extraordinary causal powers being ascribed to “racism” — claims that far outstrip available evidence. Some of these claims may well be true, but there is a clear moral stigma associated with questioning the causal connection being posited – which is perverse, since the question of what causes what should be a purely empirical one. Questioning the connection, however, is likely to attract charges of seeking to “minimize racism.” (Indeed, many people, just reading the previous two sentences, will already be thinking to themselves “Oh my God, this guy is seeking to minimize racism.”) There also seems to be a sense that, because racism is an incredibly bad thing, it must also cause a lot of other bad things. But what is at work here is basically an intuition about how the moral order is organized, not one about the causal order. It’s always possible for something to be extremely bad (intrinsically, as it were), or extremely common, and yet causally not all that significant.

I actually think this sort of confusion between the moral and the causal order happens a lot. Furthermore, despite having a lot of sympathy for “qualitative” social science, I think the problem is much worse in these areas. Indeed, one of the major advantages of quantitative approaches to social science is that it makes it pretty much impossible to get away with doing normative sociology.

The author is too optimistic about the resilience of quantitative psychology

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Incidentally, “normative sociology” doesn’t necessarily have a left-wing bias. There are lots of examples of conservatives doing it as well (e.g. rising divorce rates must be due to tolerance of homosexuality, out-of-wedlock births must be caused by the welfare system etc.) The difference is that people on the left are often more keen on solving various social problems, and so they have a set of pragmatic interests at play that can strongly bias judgement. The latter case is particularly frustrating, because if the plan is to solve some social problem by attacking its causal antecedents, then it is really important to get the causal connections right – otherwise your intervention is going to prove useless, and quite possibly counterproductive.

Having identified real problems, but having ascribed them to spurious causes, the left has found it difficult to formulate policy remedies. (177)

I recall marvelling at how seldom I had heard this idea expressed: that the left consistently gets it right when it comes to identifying problems, but then gets the explanations wrong (and often clings to those explanations long after they have proven problematic), and so is practically ineffective.

I think that “normative sociology” has a lot to do with this. From casual observation (by which I mean having spent hundreds of hours listening to people criticize various sorts of social problems), I can see four major variants of normative sociology.

1. Wanting a policy lever.[…] The case in which I have seen this most clearly is the tendency to overestimate the causal effects of inequality – because the distribution of wealth is something that the state does have the ability to control. So if “intractable social problem A” can be shown to be caused by “poverty of group B,” then that gives the state leverage over the intractable social problem, because it can always redistribute wealth to B.

To take a concrete example, one hears a lot these days about the “social health gradient” […] I can’t count the number of presentations on public health I’ve heard that start out talking about SES and then just subtly shift toward talking about wealth inequality, in order then to recommend some form of income redistribution.

2. Worrying about “blaming the victim.” […] when people don’t want to hold X responsible for A, they feel a powerful impulse to resist any suggestion that X’s choices or actions might have caused A. This is, of course, a confusion, since whether or not X caused A is just a factual question, which doesn’t really decide the question of responsibility. And yet I’ve often heard academics being challenged, after having made an entirely empirical claim about the source of a particular social problem, by people saying “aren’t you just blaming the victim?” One can see here a moral concern intruding where it does not belong. If we follow this line of reasoning, we wind up talking about what we would like the cause of problems to be, rather than what they actually are. […]

To pick just one obvious example of this, there is an enormous reluctance to believe that underdevelopment could be largely due to domestic conditions within poor countries. There is a pressing need to treat this poverty as some kind of harm inflicted upon the poor by rich countries, or else a consequence of past harms (e.g. a “legacy of colonialism”) — not so much because any of the mechanisms being posited seem all that persuasive, but rather that doing anything other involves “blaming the victim,” or treating the poor as somehow responsible for their condition.

3. Picking one side of a correlation. This is a more subtle one. Statistical analysis often reveals a correlation between two things, but as we all know, correlation does not imply causation. If A tends to go hand-in-hand with B, it could be that 1) A causes B, or 2) B causes A, or 3) A and B are mutually reinforcing, or 4) there is some third thing, C, that causes both A and B. It is, however, very very common for statistical correlations to be reported as causal ones. (This is, for instance, a huge problem in health care reporting. Growing up, my mother was afraid to cook with aluminium pots or use anti-perspirant, because of studies reporting the presence of aluminium in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients. But even if true, there was no reason to think that exposure to aluminium was causing the disease, could be that the disease caused the accumulation of aluminium, or that some other thing caused both.) Because this sort of sloppy thinking happens all the time, it’s not so difficult for people who would like to believe that A causes B to respond to evidence of correlation between the two as confirmation of their view.

The debate over the so-called “culture of poverty” provides some great examples of all three of these tendencies. It has certainly not escaped anyone’s notice that poverty is (statistically) associated with a large number of behaviour patterns that are, shall we say, self-undermining (petty crime, teenage pregnancy, broken families, drug addiction, domestic violence, etc.) The stereotypical conservative looks at this and says “see, no wonder they’re poor, it’s because of all the bad choices they are making.” The stereotypical liberal looks at it and says, “no wonder they’re making such bad choices, it’s because they’re so poor.” In many of these cases, some kind of mutual reinforcement story seems like the most likely account, but the more common ideological response is to pick out one direction of causation and to focus on that. […]

4. Metaphysical views. I mentioned this above, but often there is a sense that the moral awfulness of some action or episode requires that it have enormous consequences. This can easily lead to the view that anyone who denies the causal effects is in some way minimizing or downplaying the moral awfulness. (Now if everyone were a moral consequentialist, then this would all make sense, since the awfulness of an action would be determined entirely by its effects, and so minimizing the effects would be minimizing the awfulness. But most people are not consequentialists.)

A good example of this in contemporary debates involves attitudes towards rising inequality. Many people think this is very bad. And yet, there is also a desire to believe that, if it is very bad, then it must also cause a lot of other bad things. (Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s book The Spirit Level is an example of this tendency, as is Joseph Stiglitz’s The Price of Inequality.) There is also a common desire to think that political unrest and revolutions are caused by poverty and inequality, whereas the preponderance of evidence suggests that they are not (rising expectations are more important). And yet, anyone who denies that inequality has these effects is liable to stand accused of seeking to makes excuses for it (notice, for example, how Paul Krugman, in this interesting comment on Stiglitz, goes out of his way to emphasize that he is still condemning inequality).

[…] The “sociology” thing is just part of the joke: “Sociologists are people who study the causes of social problems [i.e. funny stereotype], so normative sociologists are people who study what the causes should be [even funnier].” When I use the term, it’s primarily applied to people in philosophy and political theory, not to actual social scientists. Second, for all those who are saying “he doesn’t provide any evidence to support his claims,” all I can say is “dude, it’s a blog post.” If you’ve never seen anyone doing normative sociology, then congratulations — you must attend better conferences than I do.

Addendum: My review of Heath’s book, Enlightenment 2.0

pardon the shameless copying from

“Normative sociology": the study of what the causes of problems ought to be

found here Permalink

Excellent post by Joseph Heath:

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Literature that sociology or anthropology are not science, not even quantitative psychology is!

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Female domestic violence is rampant, violates the feminist politically correct narrative. This leading academic researcher describes all the tricks hw this fraud is committed.
Psychology findings all wrong:
Dogmatical ignorance of genetics is the main reason, followed by finagling results until they conform to PC beliefs.
Nurture Assumption Judith Rich Harris
The Nurture Assumption by Judith Rich Harris devastatingly shows: All of social science research is wrong, because they tacitly that only nurture counts, there is no genetic inborn hereditary behavior component.
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