Now that Osama Bin Laden is dead, President Obama has produced a birth certificate, and Prince William and Kate are married, we can turn our attention to the really important questions, namely, why are there so many liberals in academe, and so few conservatives?

This is a topic of discussion within the discipline of social psychology over at the Edge forum, where the moral psychologist (as distinct from immoral psychologist) Jonathan Haidt observes that social psychology has become a “tribal moral community” bound together by liberal values and blind to any ideas or findings that threaten those values.

I’m shocked to hear this. To think that even academics prefer to associate with like-minded people, or that much of rational thinking is expended on the goal of justifying one’s deeply held beliefs and values – always easier to do in a group of fellow believers than in in a diverse (let’s banish that cliché and use ‘divergent’ instead) community – and not necessarily on dispassionately arriving at the “truth” of the matter.

But who cares about academe? For me, the more pressing question is, why are there so many conservatives in my extended family? Get The Drift for more.