Is Social Science Biased Against Conservatives?

That’s the question at the heart of an
interesting
New Yorker article that focuses on the work of New
York University social and moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt. The
article opens with the now notorious occasion in which Haidt asked
for a show of hands indicating political ideology during his
presentation at the annual convention of the Society for
Personality and Social Psychology. The New Yorker
reports:

First came the liberals: a “sea of hands,” comprising about
eighty per cent of the room, Haidt later recalled. Next, the
centrists or moderates. Twenty hands. Next, the libertarians.
Twelve hands. And last, the conservatives. Three hands.

Social psychology, Haidt went on, had an obvious problem: a lack
of political diversity that was every bit as dangerous as a lack
of, say, racial or religious or gender diversity. It discouraged
conservative students from joining the field, and it discouraged
conservative members from pursuing certain lines of argument. It
also introduced bias into research questions, methodology, and,
ultimately, publications. The topics that social psychologists
chose to study and how they chose to study them, he argued,
suffered from homogeneity. The effect was limited, Haidt was quick
to point out, to areas that concerned political ideology and
politicized notions, like race, gender, stereotyping, and power and
inequality. “It’s not like the whole field is undercut, but when it
comes to research on controversial topics, the effect is most
pronounced,” he later told me.

Haidt and his colleagues more formally lay out their concerns in
a
forthcoming article in Behavorial and Brain Sciences.
From the abstract:

Psychologists have demonstrated the value of
diversity—particularly diversity of viewpoints—for enhancing
creativity, discovery, and problem solving. But one key type of
viewpoint diversity is lacking in academic psychology in general
and social psychology in particular: political diversity. This
article reviews the available evidence and finds support for four
claims: 1) Academic psychology once had considerable political
diversity, but has lost nearly all of it in the last 50 years; 2)
This lack of political diversity can undermine the validity of
social psychological science via mechanisms such as the embedding
of liberal values into research questions and methods, steering
researchers away from important but politically unpalatable
research topics, and producing conclusions that mischaracterize
liberals and conservatives alike; 3) Increased political diversity
would improve social psychological science by reducing the impact
of bias mechanisms such as confirmation bias, and by empowering
dissenting minorities to improve the quality of the majority’s
thinking; and 4) The underrepresentation of non-liberals in social
psychology is most likely due to a combination of self-selection,
hostile climate, and discrimination.

Of course, in their self-estimation liberals cannot be
close-minded and discriminatory. The New Yorker notes that
Harvard University psychologist Daniel Glibert explained:

“Liberals may be more interested in new ideas, more willing to
work for peanuts, or just more intelligent.”

Well, maybe. But some Dutch psychologists reporting the results
of their survey of academic psychologists offered another reason:
Overt
professional discrimination against conservatives. From their
study:

Hostility toward and willingness to discriminate against
conservatives is widespread. One in six respondents said that she
or he would be somewhat (or more) inclined to discriminate against
conservatives in inviting them for symposia or reviewing their
work. One in four would discriminate in reviewing their grant
applications. More than one in three would discriminate against
them when making hiring decisions. Thus, willingness to
discriminate is not limited to small decisions. In fact, it is
strongest when it comes to the most important decisions, such as
grant applications and hiring.

The whole The New Yorker
article is worth your attention.

For more background, see Haidt’s Reason May 2012 cover
article, “Born This
Way?: Nature, nurture, narratives, and the making of our political
personalities,” and my article reporting on his research into
the libertarian moral personality, “The
Science of Libertarian Morality.”