View-Point Discrimination in Occupational Therapy

Published Feb 23, 2014 printer-friendly

My hope with this post is to encourage our profession to engage in collective introspection regarding what I have found to be a very salient part of occupational therapy’s culture. That is view-point discrimination. It is something I have experienced myself and witnessed ever since starting my M.A. program in 2010. It is an exclusionary behavior most have probably not heard of, but one we should all be aware of in order to comply with our Code of Ethics and fulfill the Centennial Vision for a diverse workforce and inclusive profession.

The exclusion results from treating others differently because of the political or philosophical views they hold. The establishment culture in occupational therapy is what can be termed politically liberal, progressive or to the left of the political spectrum. The exclusionary behavior that occurs, then, is most commonly against those who are termed conservative, pro-free market, or to the right of the political spectrum.

I have experienced this several times at my school, and with OT professors across the country.

One notable event at my school was a cartoon put up for comic relief during a lecture. It was a cartoon making fun of those who favored tax cuts as being ignorant and apathetic. In another instance, someone who disagreed with the idea that patients should receive government money to purchase cigarettes was made to feel ashamed in front of the class for expressing her view. The result was a letter to the administration about the incident. A third event involved the administration sending out a voter guide to students, telling them to vote for every single Democrat running for statewide office and all the liberal measures on the ballot.

In 2012, when I was sending out an invitation to visit my table for The Social Justice Syllabus Project, one professor’s response to the invitation that included a list of books and articles from the political right was that I should consider leaving the profession and get another career. Note that The Social Justice Syllabus Project is a reading project. It promotes the reading of authors and perspectives now neglected in the profession – and for that I was told to find another profession.

At one conference a student asked me about a political belief I expressed on my website, and then told me “You have some real [guts] coming to the conference.” I did not understand how holding a political belief based on moral reasoning should exclude me from a professional conference.

Ultimately, the problem of exclusionary behavior based on one's view-point comes from a lack of substantive exposure to a variety of perspectives. Unless students are exposed to great thinking and research from various perspectives, they develop the habit of simply rejecting unfamiliar ideas that challenge their values. A serious problem in occupational therapy programs is the lack of political and philosophical diversity in the reading material students are assigned. This problem is exacerbated with the politicization of the profession, which is turning the practice of occupational therapy into “justice activism.”

The problem of those with a politically liberal perspective not understanding how those with other perspectives think was revealed by the research of the social psychologist and Democratic activist Jonathan Haidt. His research was presented in The Righteous Mind (2012).

Much of the work on political views by psychologists is not very helpful because the researchers’ own ideological biases are not accounted for. What makes Haidt’s study better than others is that he recognized a varied approach to moral values, rather than holding egalitarian redistributionism as the absolute standard of public morality. His schema allowed him to test which side of the political divide better understood how the other side thought. He found that when describing the thinking of political opponents:

“Liberals were the least accurate” (Haidt, 2012, p. 287).

He also found that among liberals, the worst ones at describing how political opponents thought were:

“those who described themselves as ‘very liberal’” (Haidt, 2012, p. 287).

This is a very liberal man, and accomplished scholar saying that the very liberal are the worst at understanding how others think.

The biggest errors for liberals in understanding others came on questions of justice (Haidt, 2012, p. 287).

At a conference for social psychologists in 2011, Haidt warned about the near unanimity of liberals in the field. It was bad for the profession of social psychology, he said, because it was very easy for professors to become trapped in a bubble of like-minded flatterers, which encourages taboos against anything perceived as conservative thinking and blinds them to biases in their own research (see “Social Scientists Sees Bias Within,” http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/08/science/08tier.html?_r=0, accessed Oct. 27, 2012).

Haidt suggested that to protect themselves from their liberal bias, social psychologists needed to start reading thinkers on the political right. And I believe that is good advice for addressing viewpoint discrimination in the occupational therapy.

One of the authors recommended by Haidt was Thomas Sowell, who has written dozens of book and whose columns are widely available on the internet.

There are dozens of other authors and any list would be incomplete, but I offer some works below in case some are curious. I also invite readers to explore the “Articles” tab and the “Syllabuses” tab at socialjusticesyllabus.org for more reading material. There is also a “Videos” tab that includes both short presentations and long lectures on a whole host of subjects.

I think it is important for members of the profession of occupational therapy to understand opposing viewpoints at a substantive level if we are going to effectively create a culture that is inclusive of political and philosophical diversity.