Exclusive: what Elijah Anderson thinks about the way his work is cited by Walsh & Yun (2017)

Yale University sociology professor Elijah Anderson is known for his 1999 book Code of the street, and the 1994 Atlantic Monthly article on which it is based. When I was recently re-reading through the 2017 paper by Walsh & Yun (which I previously critiqued on this blog), I noticed that his work was cited a couple times by the authors of the paper. Given that Callie Burt, in her critique of Walsh & Yun's paper, accuses them of "selectively [citing] passages from prominent African American scholars Elijah Anderson and Orlando Patterson in decontextualized ways", I decided to ask Anderson himself how he thinks about how Walsh & Yun cite his work in their paper. So I emailed him this question (verbatim): 
"I wanted to ask you a question about this paper, which was published last year in the Journal of Criminal Justice:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047235217300880 The question is: do you think it accurately represents your work that it cites (e.g. "The Code of the Streets" (the Atlantic, 1994))?"

He replied with this answer (which he sent after I emailed him a PDF of the article at his request) (also copied verbatim):

"Writers who assume my ethnographic analysis of the “code of the street” is “racist,” I believe, have a quite limited appreciation and understanding of the ethnographic method.  I suggest you review my 2002 AJS piece, “The Ideological Critique," written in response to Loic Wacquant’s criticisms.  The “code…” is a human response to the exigencies of life in a distressed social environment in which residents, and especially youth, believe that the wider authorities, especially law enforcement, have effectively abdicated their civic responsibilities to the local communities.  Hence, “street justice” fills the void and “street credibility” comes to matter a good deal in the course of everyday life.  Ethnography is the systematic description of culture, a set of shared understandings, or ‘local knowledge,’ that emerges as a human population deals with the demands of everyday life.  I could say more, but I hope this enough for you to get the picture.  The writer of the piece you sent seems to have a very limited appreciation of ethnography, and the piece seems to reflect this."

My notes:

The 2002 AJS piece he's talking about (which is actually called "The Ideologically Driven Critique") can be found here.

Who is Noah Carl?

I would create this on Wikipedia but I doubt that he is notable.

Noah Carl is a British psychologist known for researching intelligence and its relationship to political views. On his faculty page, he states that his research interests include "psychometrics, social identity, immigration, social inequality and economic development." He received his D. Phil. from Nuffield College, Oxford in September 2017, where he was supervised by Francesco Billari and Nan Dirk de Graaf. Since then, he has been a research officer and postdoctoral researcher at Nuffield College's Centre for Social Investigation. He spoke twice at the London Conference on Intelligence, and has published multiple studies in Emil Kirkegaard's OpenPsych journals.

Biography
Carl was born and raised in Cambridge, England.

Studies
A 2014 study by Carl determined that individuals with both socially and economically liberal beliefs tend to have higher verbal intelligence. Reason reports that Carl also found that "[strong] Republicans have a 5.48 IQ point advantage over [strong] Democrats," and that "those who endorse both social conservatism and economic statism also have lower verbal IQ scores".

One of the studies written by Carl for one of the OpenPsych journals was one on the correlation between British opposition to UK immigrants of different nationalities and their arrest rates there. Published in 2016, the study concluded that "in the UK, net opposition to immigrants of different nationalities (n = 23) correlates strongly with the log of immigrant arrests rates (r = .77; p = 0.00002; 95% CI = [.52, .90]) and with the log of their arrest rates for violent crime". It was cited favorably in the Daily Caller and Infowars. However, it has been criticized for alleged serious methodological flaws, with McMaster University geographer Niko Yiannakoulias writing that it "offers no insight on the matter [of whether immigrant groups' criminality is related to opposition to such groups] either way, and...research this bad should never be published in any form" (emphasis in original).*

In 2017, he wrote Lackademia: why do academics lean left?, a report released by the right-wing Adam Smith Institute. The report claimed that liberal overrepresentation in academia is so great that only 12% of lecturers at UK universities are conservatives, and that this political imbalance may have become worse since the 1960s. The report has been criticized for relying on a survey that was self-selected, and conflating data from this survey with data from a book by A.H. Halsey. John Morgan, who says he was "one of the main sources of evidence cited by the report", criticized it harshly in a Times Higher Education article. Morgan wrote: 

"Using a self-selecting survey as a rough guide to possible voting patterns in a forthcoming election is one thing. It is another to conflate that survey with totally separate data and use this flimsy base to make sweeping judgements, as Carl does in suggesting that growing “ideological homogeneity” has led to “the trend towards curtailments of free speech on university campuses” or that it “has arguably led to systematic biases in scholarship”. There is no evidence in his report that this is true."

Other topics he has researched include the correlation between IQ and party voting in the UK, public opinion on Brexit, and the link between countries' intelligence, trust, efficiency of public institutions, and economic growth.


Selected publications (highest to lowest citation counts on Google Scholar)
This list only includes articles in reputable journals that have at least 1 citation on Google Scholar, so at least a few publications he has (co)authored are omitted from this list.

• Verbal intelligence is correlated with socially and economically liberal beliefs (2014)
• Generalized Trust and Intelligence in the United States (2014)
• Does intelligence explain the association between generalized trust and economic development? (2014)
• Does intelligence have a U-shaped relationship with leftism? (2015)
• IQ AND SOCIOECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT ACROSS REGIONS OF THE UK (2016)
• Cognitive ability and political beliefs in the United States (2015)
• Scientific literacy, optimism about science and conservatism (2016)
• Cognitive ability and party identity in the United States (2014)
• Can intelligence explain the overrepresentation of liberals and leftists in American academia? (2015)
• IQ and socio-economic development across local authorities of the UK (2016)
• Ethnicity and electoral fraud in Britain (2017)
• Does Activism in Social Science Explain Conservatives’ Distrust of Scientists? (2018)
• Human Rights: Why Countries Differ (2018)
• Lack of European Identity and the Failure of the Eurozone (2017)

His Google Scholar h-index is currently 8 (as of 10/23/18).

OpenPsych journals

• A total of 5 published articles, all in OQSPS.

*Note: during the brief time I myself was active in the OpenPsych journals, I actually confronted Carl about this by posting in one of the post-review forums on the OpenPsych website. He responded to me bringing up the criticisms in the McMaster University blog post mentioned above in the same forum, and you can read his response here.

Update: Holy shit, this post is actually linked from RationalWiki!

Update 2: I actually emailed Nuffield College to ask them why the faculty profile for Carl on their website (archived version available here) had been taken offline since I originally wrote this post in March 2018. They replied to my email telling me that it was taken offline because Carl is no longer a faculty member at Nuffield. Their response explained, "When an individual leaves the College's employ, their profile is routinely removed from the College website." I had thought something fishy might have been going on, like with the College trying to hide Carl's former connections with them, but apparently not after all.

openpsych journals

ODP
Kirkegaard = 18
Not Kirkegaard = 14

OBG
K = 1
NK = 6

OQSPS
K = 8
NK = 4

Total
K = 27
NK = 24

So the total % of articles in all 3 Openpsych journals written or co-written by Kirkegaard himself is about 53% (27/51).