Diversity is strength, and tolerance is good; unless it's the outgroup we're talking about, of course. More on psychologists & sociologists: "Political Diversity Will Improve Social Psychological Science", Duarte et al 20142 http://journals.cambridge.org/images/fileUpload/documents/Duarte-Haidt_BBS-D-14-00108_preprint.pdf ; excerpts:
"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. We close with recommendations for increasing political diversity in social psychology.
Tetlock (1994) identified ways in which moral-political values led to unjustified conclusions about nuclear deterrence and prejudice, and Redding (2001) showed how the lack of political diversity across psychology's subfields threatens the validity of the conclusions of psychological science.
Second, we focus on conservatives as an under-represented group because the data on the prevalence in psychology of different ideological groups is best for the liberal-conservative contrast-and the departure from the proportion of liberals and conservatives in the U.S. population is so dramatic. However, we argue that the field needs more non-liberals however they specifically self-identify (e.g., libertarian, moderate). Third, it is important to recognize that conservatism is not monolithic-indeed, self-identified conservatives may be more diverse in their political beliefs than are liberals (Feldman & Johnston, 2014; Stern, 2005; Stenner, 2009). Fourth, we note for the curious reader that the collaborators on this article include one liberal, one centrist, two libertarians, one whose politics defy a simple left/right categorization, and one neo-positivist contrarian who favors a don't-ask-don't-tell policy in which scholarship should be judged on its merits. None identifies as conservative or Republican.
There are many academic fields in which surveys find self-identified conservatives to be about as numerous as self-identified liberals; typically business, computer science, engineering, health sciences, and technical/vocational fields (Zipp & Fenwick, 2006; Gross & Simmons, 2007) 2 . In the social sciences and humanities, however, there is a stronger imbalance. For instance, recent surveys find that 58 - 66 percent of social science professors in the United States identify as liberals, while only 5 - 8 percent identify as conservatives, and that self-identified Democrats outnumber Republicans by ratios of at least 8 to 1 (Gross & Simmons, 2007; Klein & Stern, 2009; Rothman & Lichter, 2008). A similar situation is found in the humanities where surveys find that 52 - 77 percent of humanities professors identify as liberals, while only 4 - 8 percent identify as conservatives, and that self-identified Democrats outnumber Republicans by ratios of at least 5:1 (Gross & Simmons, 2007; Rothman & Lichter, 2008). In psychology the imbalance is slightly stronger: 84 percent identify as liberal while only 8 percent identify as conservative (Gross & Simmons, 2007; Rothman & Lichter, 2008). That is a ratio of 10.5 to 1. In the United States as a whole, the ratio of liberals to conservatives is roughly 1 to 2 (Gallup, 2010).
In Figure 1 [pg52 https://i.imgur.com/LHE8UhQ.png ], we have plotted all available data points on the political identity of psychologists at American colleges and universities, including both party identification (diamonds) and liberal-conservative identification (circles). Both sets of measures show a strong left-ward movement. Psychology professors were as likely to report voting Republican as Democrat in presidential contests in the 1920s. From the 1930s through 1960, they were more likely to report voting for Democrats, but substantial minorities voted for Wilkie, Eisenhower, and Nixon (in 1960). By 2006, however, the ratio of Democrats to Republicans had climbed to more than 11:1 (Gross & Simmons, 2007; Rothman & Lichter, 2008). At the 2011 meeting in San Antonio, Texas, Jonathan Haidt asked the roughly 1,000 attendees to identify themselves politically with a show of hands. He counted the exact number of hands raised for the options "conservative or on the right" (3 hands), "moderate or centrist" (20 hands), and "libertarian" (12 hands). For the option "liberal or on the left," it was not possible to count, but he estimated that approximately 80% of the audience raised a hand (i.e., roughly 800 liberals). The corresponding liberal-conservative ratio of 267:1 is surely an overestimate; in this nonanonymous survey, many conservatives may have been reluctant to raise their hands. But if conservatives were disproportionately reluctant to self-identify, it illustrates the problem we are raising.
The other piece of evidence we have comes from an anonymous internet survey conducted by Inbar and Lammers (2012), who set out to test Haidt's claim that there were hardly any conservatives in social psychology. They sent an email invitation to the entire SPSP discussion list, from which 292 3 individuals participated. Inbar & Lammers found that 85 percent of these respondents declared themselves liberal, 9 percent moderate, and only 6 percent conservative 4 (a ratio of 14:1). Furthermore, the trend toward political homogeneity seems to be continuing: whereas 10% of faculty respondents self-identified as conservative, only 2% of graduate students and postdocs did so (Inbar, 2013, personal communication). This pattern is consistent with the broader trends throughout psychology illustrated in Figure 1: the field is shifting leftward, the ratio of liberals to conservatives is now greater than 10:1, and there are hardly any conservative students in the pipeline.
Example 1: Denial of environmental realities. Feygina, Jost and Goldsmith (2010) sought to explain the "denial of environmental realities" using system justification theory (Jost & Banaji, 1994). In operationalizing such denial, the authors assessed the four constructs listed below, with example items in parentheses:
Construct 1: Denial of the possibility of an ecological crisis ("If things continue on their present course, we will soon experience a major environmental catastrophe," reverse scored).
Construct 2: Denial of limits to growth ("The earth has plenty of natural resources if we just learn how to develop them.")
Construct 3: Denial of the need to abide by the constraints of nature ("Humans will eventually learn enough about how nature works to be able to control it.")
Construct 4: Denial of the danger of disrupting balance in nature ("The balance of nature is strong enough to cope with the impacts of modern industrial nations.")
The core problem with this research is that it misrepresents those who merely disagree with environmentalist values and slogans as being in "denial." Indeed, the papers Feygina et al (2010) cited in support of their "denial" questions never used the terms "deny" or "denial" to describe these measures. Clark, Kotchen, and Moore (2003) referred to the items as assessing "attitudes" and Dunlap, Van Liere, Mertig, and Jones (2000) characterized the items as tapping "primitive beliefs" (p. 439) about the environment.
...Whether some people deny actual environmental realities, and if so, why, remains an interesting and potentially scientifically tractable question. For example, one might assess "environmental denial" by showing people a time-lapse video taken over several years showing ocean levels rising over an island, and asking people if sea levels were rising. There would be a prima facie case for identifying those who answered "no" to such a question as "denying environmental realities." However, Feygina et al. (2010) did not perform such studies. Instead, they simply measured support for primitive environmentalist beliefs and values, called low levels of such support denial, and regressed it on the system justification scores and other measures (a third, experimental study, did not assess denial). None of Feygina et al.'s (2010) measures refer to environmental realities. Thus, the studies were not capable of producing scientific evidence of denial of environmental realities.
Example 2: Ideology and unethical behavior. Son Hing, Bobocel, Zanna, and McBride (2007) found that: 1) people high in social dominance orientation (SDO) were more likely to make unethical decisions, 2) people high in right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) were more likely to go along with the unethical decisions of leaders, and 3) dyads with high SDO leaders and high RWA followers made more unethical decisions than dyads with alternative arrangements (e.g., low SDO-low RWA dyads).
Yet consider the decisions they defined as unethical: not formally taking a female colleague's side in her sexual harassment complaint against her subordinate (given little information about the case), and a worker placing the well-being of his or her company above unspecified harms to the environment attributed to the company's operations. Liberal values of feminism and environmentalism were embedded directly into the operationalization of ethics, even to the extent that participants were expected to endorse those values in vignettes that lacked the information one would need to make a considered judgment.
Turnabout tests often constitute a simple tool for identifying and avoiding embedded values bias (Tetlock, 1994). Imagine a counterfactual social psychology field in which conservative political views were treated as "scientific facts" and disagreements with conservative views treated as denial or error. In this field, scholars might regularly publish studies on "the denial of the benefits of free market capitalism" or "the denial of the benefits of a strong military" or "the denial of the benefits of church attendance." Or, they might publish studies showing that people low in RWA and SDO (i.e., liberals) are more unethical because they are more willing to disrespect authority, disregard private property, and restrict voluntary individual choice in the marketplace. Embedding any type of ideological values into measures is dangerous to science.
Example 1: Stereotype accuracy. Since the 1930s, social psychologists have been proclaiming the inaccuracy of social stereotypes, despite lacking evidence of such inaccuracy. Evidence has seemed unnecessary because stereotypes have been, in effect, stereotyped as inherently nasty and inaccurate (see Jussim, 2012a for a review).
Some group stereotypes are indeed hopelessly crude and untestable. But some may rest on valid empiricism-and represent subjective estimates of population characteristics (e.g. the proportion of people who drop out of high school, are victims of crime, or endorse policies that support women at work, see Jussim, 2012a, Ryan, 2002 for reviews). In this context, it is not surprising that the rigorous empirical study of the accuracy of factual stereotypes was initiated by one of the very few self-avowed conservatives in social psychology-Clark McCauley (McCauley & Stitt, 1978). Since then, dozens of studies by independent researchers have yielded evidence that stereotype accuracy (of all sorts of stereotypes) is one of the most robust effects in all of social psychology ([Jussim, L. (2012a). Social perception and social reality: Why accuracy dominates bias and self-fulfilling prophecy http://gen.lib.rus.ec/get?md5=b1e521e63710cfed147bf3885dfb25ca New York: Oxford University Press.]). Here is a clear example of the value of political diversity: a conservative social psychologist asked a question nobody else thought (or dared) to ask, and found results that continue to make many social psychologists uncomfortable. McCauley's willingness to put the assumption of stereotype inaccuracy to an empirical test led to the correction of one of social psychology's most longstanding errors.
Example 2: The scope and direction of prejudice. Prejudice and intolerance have long been considered the province of the political right (e.g., Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, & Sanford, 1950; Duckitt, 2001; Lindner & Nosek, 2009). Indeed, since Allport (1954), social psychologists have suspected that there is a personality type associated with generalized prejudice toward a variety of social groups (Akrami, Ekehammar, & Bergh, 2011), which they have linked to political conservatism (Roets & van Hiel, 2011). More recently, however, several scholars have noted that the groups typically considered targets of prejudice in such research programs are usually low status and often left-leaning (e.g., African-Americans and Communists; for more examples and further arguments, see Chambers, Schlenker & Collisson, 2013 and Crawford & Pilanski, 2013). Using research designs that include both left-leaning and right-leaning targets, and using nationally representative as well as student and community samples, these researchers have demonstrated that prejudice is potent on both the left and right. Conservatives are prejudiced against stereotypically left-leaning targets (e.g., AfricanAmericans), whereas liberals are prejudiced against stereotypically right-leaning targets (e.g., religious Christians; see Chambers et al., 2013; Crawford & Pilanski, 2013; Wetherell, Brandt, & Reyna, 2013).
Summarizing these recent findings, Brandt, Reyna, Chambers, Crawford, and Wetherell (2014) put forward the ideological conflict hypothesis, which posits that people across the political spectrum are prejudiced against ideologically dissimilar others. Once again, the shared moral narrative of social psychology seems to have restricted the range of research: the investigation of prejudice was long limited to prejudice against the targets that liberals care most about. But the presence of a non-liberal researcher (John Chambers is a libertarian) led to an expansion of the range of targets, which might, over time, lead the entire field to a more nuanced view of the relationship between politics and prejudice.
Instead of assuming that stereotypes are inaccurate without citing evidence, ask, "How (in)accurate are stereotypes? What has empirical research found?" Instead of asking, "Why are conservatives so prejudiced and politically intolerant?" (Hodson & Busseri, 2012; Lindner & Nosek, 2009), ask, "Which groups are targets of prejudice and intolerance across the political spectrum, and why?" (Brandt et al., 2014). One does not need to be politically conservative to ask the latter questions. Indeed, one of the authors of the ideological conflict hypothesis (Crawford) self-describes as liberal.
A long-standing view in social-political psychology is that the right is more dogmatic and intolerant of ambiguity than the left, a view Tetlock (1983) dubbed the rigidity-of-the-right hypothesis. Altemeyer (1996; 1998) argued that a consequence of this asymmetry in rigidity is that those on the right (specifically, people high in RWA) should be more prone to making biased political judgment than those on the left. For example, Altemeyer (1996) found that people high in RWA were biased in favor of Christian over Muslim mandatory school prayer in American and Arab public schools, respectively, whereas people low in RWA opposed mandatory school prayer regardless of the religious target group...But had social psychologists studied a broad enough range of situations to justify these broad conclusions? Recent evidence suggests not. The ideologically objectionable premise model (IOPM; Crawford, 2012) posits that people on the political left and right are equally likely to approach political judgments with their ideological blinders on. That said, they will only do so when the premise of a political judgment is ideologically acceptable. If it's objectionable, any preferences for one group over another will be short-circuited, and biases won't emerge. The IOPM thus allows for biases to emerge only among liberals, only among conservatives, or among both liberals and conservatives, depending on the situation. For example, reinterpreting Altemeyer's mandatory school prayer results, Crawford (2012) argued that for people low in RWA who value individual freedom and autonomy, mandatory school prayer is objectionable; thus, the very nature of the judgment should shut off any biases in favor of one target over the other. However, for people high in RWA who value society-wide conformity to traditional morals and values, mandating school prayer is acceptable; this acceptable premise then allows for people high in RWA to express a bias in favor of Christian over Muslim school prayer. Crawford (2012, Study 1) replaced mandatory prayer with voluntary prayer, which would be acceptable to both people high and low in RWA. In line with the IOPM, people high in RWA were still biased in favor of Christian over Muslim prayer, while people low in RWA now showed a bias in favor of Muslim over Christian voluntary prayer.
In another study, Crawford (2012, Study 2) reasoned that the left typically finds it acceptable to criticize and question authority. Therefore, a scenario involving a subordinate criticizing an authority figure would permit people low in RWA to punish a subordinate who criticizes an ideologically similar leader (e.g., President Barack Obama) more harshly than one who criticizes an ideologically dissimilar leader (e.g., President George W. Bush). However, such criticism of authority represents an objectionable premise for people high in RWA-thus, they should punish the subordinate equally, regardless of the leader's identity. Consistent with the IOPM, people low in RWA more harshly punished a military general who criticized Obama than one who criticized Bush, whereas people high in RWA punished the general equally regardless of the target leader's identity. Thus, this scenario shows the reversal of Altemeyer's findings-biases emerged among the left, but not the right. Results from seven scenarios have supported the ideologically objectionable premise model (see Crawford, 2012; Crawford & Xhambazi, 2013) and indicate that biased political judgments are not predicted by ideological orientation (as per Altemeyer), but rather by the qualities of the judgment scenarios used in the research.
Several programs of research have found evidence of strengths and weaknesses among both liberals and conservatives, including moral foundations theory (e.g., Haidt, 2012), the ideologically objectionable premise model (Crawford, 2012; Crawford & Xhambazi, in press), and the ideological conflict hypothesis (e.g., Brandt et al., 2014; Crawford, Modri, & Motyl, 2013; Munro, Lasane, & Leary, 2010).
It is extremely difficult to avoid confirmation bias in everyday reasoning; for example, courses in "critical thinking" temporarily suppress confirmation bias, but do not eliminate it (Lilienfeld, Ammirati, & Landfield, 2009). Even research communities of highly intelligent and well-meaning individuals can fall prey to confirmation bias, as IQ is positively correlated with the number of reasons people find to support their own side in an argument, and is uncorrelated with the (much lower) number of reasons people find to support the opposing argument (Perkins, Farady & Bushey, 1991).
There is even evidence that politically diverse teams produce more creative solutions than do politically homogeneous teams on problems such as "how can a person of average talent achieve fame" and how to find funding for a partially-built church ineligible for bank loans (Triandis, Hall, & Ewen, 1965). Pairs constituting one liberal and one conservative produced more creative solutions to these problems than did liberal-liberal or conservative-conservative pairings.
Second, the observed relationship between intelligence and conservatism largely depends on how conservatism is operationalized. Social conservatism correlates with lower cognitive ability test scores, but economic conservatism correlates with higher scores (Iyer, Koleva, Graham, Ditto, & Haidt, 2012; Kemmelmeier 2008). Similarly, Feldman and Johnston (2014) find in multiple nationally representative samples that social conservatism negatively predicted educational attainment, whereas economic conservatism positively predicted educational attainment. Together, these results likely explain why both Heaven et al. (2011) and Hodson and Busseri (2012) found a negative correlation between IQ and conservatism-because "conservatism" was operationalized as Right-Wing Authoritarianism, which is more strongly related to social than economic conservatism (van Hiel et al., 2004). In fact, Carl (2014) found that Republicans have higher mean verbal intelligence (up to 5.48 IQ points equivalent, when covariates are excluded), and this effect is driven by economic conservatism (which, as a European, he called economic liberalism, because of its emphasis on free markets). Carl suggests that libertarian Republicans overpower the negative correlation between social conservatism and verbal intelligence, to yield the aggregate mean advantage for Republicans. Moreover, the largest political effect in Kemmelmeier's (2008) study was the positive correlation between anti-regulation views and SAT-V scores, where β = .117, p < .001 (by comparison, the regression coefficient for conservatism was β = −.088, p < .01, and for being African American, β = −.169, p < .001)
There is little evidence that education causes students to become more liberal. Instead, several longitudinal studies following tens of thousands of college students for many years have concluded that political socialization in college occurs primarily as a function of one's peers, not education per se (Astin, 1993; Dey, 1997).
The Big-5 trait that correlates most strongly with political liberalism is openness to experience (r = .32 in Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski, & Sulloways's 2003 meta-analysis), and people high in that trait are more likely to pursue careers that will let them indulge their curiosity and desire to learn, such as a career in the academy (McCrae, 1996). An academic career requires a Ph.D., and liberals enter (and graduate) college more interested in pursuing Ph.D.s than do conservatives (Woessner & Kelly-Woessner, 2009). Furthermore, the personal and intellectual priorities of liberals may predispose them to an academic career: relative to conservatives, they are less interested in financial success and more interested in writing original works and making a theoretical contribution to science (Woessner & Kelly-Woessner, 2009).
Self-selection clearly plays a role [in why liberals are overrepresented in psychology]. But it would be ironic if an epistemic community resonated to empirical arguments that appear to exonerate the community of prejudice-when that same community roundly rejects those same arguments when invoked by other institutions to explain the under-representation of women or ethnic minorities (e.g., in STEM disciplines or other elite professions). Gross (2013) relied heavily on self-reports of members of the target group suspected of prejudice. But cognitive psychologists and legal scholars such as Greenwald and Krieger (2006), and Kang and Banaji (2006) argue that this type of evidence is insensitive to unconscious prejudices which, they insist, are pervasive when carefully assessed in controlled lab environments...In our view, it is disturbing when the thresholds of proof that behavioral and social scientists use in evaluating claims of prejudice hinge on "whose ox is being gored" (Tetlock & Mitchell, 2009).
...Might self-selection be amplified by an accurate perception among conservative students that they are not welcome in the social psychology community? Consider the narrative of conservatives that can be formed from some recent conclusions in social psychological research: compared to liberals, conservatives are less intelligent (Hodson & Busseri, 2012) and less cognitively complex (Jost et al., 2003). They are more rigid, dogmatic, and inflexible (Jost et al., 2003). Their lower IQ explains their racism and sexism (Deary, Batty, & Gale, 2008), and their endorsement of inequality explains why they are happier than liberals (Napier & Jost, 2008). They are hyper-responsive to threatening and negative stimuli (Hibbing, Smith, & Alford, 2013; Oxley et al., 2008), and they adopt their political beliefs in part to assuage their fears and anxieties (Jost et al., 2003). These conclusions do not remain confined to academic journals; they are widely reported in the press and in popular books about why conservatives deny science (e.g., Mooney, 2012; Tuschman, 2013).
Evidence of hostile climate is not just anecdotal. Inbar and Lammers (2012) asked members of the SPSP discussion list: "Do you feel that there is a hostile climate towards your political beliefs in your field?" Of 17 conservatives, 14 (82%) responded "yes" (i.e., a response at or above the midpoint of the scale, where the midpoint was labeled "somewhat" and the top point "very much"), with half of those responding "very much." In contrast, only 18 of 266 liberals (7%) responded "yes", with only two of those responding "very much." Interestingly, 18 of 25 moderates (72%) responded "yes," with one responding "very much."
Abramowitz et al. (1975) asked research psychologists to rate the suitability of a manuscript for publication. The methods and analyses were held identical for all reviewers; however, the result was experimentally varied between-subjects to suggest either that a group of leftist political activists on a college campus were mentally healthier-or that they were less healthy-than a comparison group of non-activists. When the leftist activists were said to be healthier, the more liberal reviewers rated the manuscript as more publishable, and the statistical analyses as more adequate, than when the otherwise identical manuscript reported that the activists were less mentally healthy. The less liberal reviewers showed no such bias. (Abramowitz et al. did not identify any conservative reviewers.)
But Inbar and Lammers (2012) found that most social psychologists who responded to their survey were willing to explicitly state that they would discriminate against conservatives. Their survey posed the question: "If two job candidates (with equal qualifications) were to apply for an opening in your department, and you knew that one was politically quite conservative, do you think you would be inclined to vote for the more liberal one?" Of the 237 liberals, only 42 (18%) chose the lowest scale point, "not at all." In other words, 82% admitted that they would be at least a little bit prejudiced against a conservative candidate, and 43% chose the midpoint ("somewhat") or above. In contrast, the majority of moderates (67%) and conservatives (83%) chose the lowest scale point ("not at all"). Inbar and Lammers (2012) assessed explicit willingness to discriminate in other ways as well, all of which told the same story: when reviewing a grant, 82% of liberals admitted at least a trace of bias, and 27% chose "somewhat" or above; when reviewing a paper, 78% admitted at least a trace of bias, and 21% chose "somewhat" or above; and when inviting participants to a symposium, 56% of liberals admitted at least a trace of bias, and 15% chose "somewhat" or above."
"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. We close with recommendations for increasing political diversity in social psychology.
Tetlock (1994) identified ways in which moral-political values led to unjustified conclusions about nuclear deterrence and prejudice, and Redding (2001) showed how the lack of political diversity across psychology's subfields threatens the validity of the conclusions of psychological science.
Second, we focus on conservatives as an under-represented group because the data on the prevalence in psychology of different ideological groups is best for the liberal-conservative contrast-and the departure from the proportion of liberals and conservatives in the U.S. population is so dramatic. However, we argue that the field needs more non-liberals however they specifically self-identify (e.g., libertarian, moderate). Third, it is important to recognize that conservatism is not monolithic-indeed, self-identified conservatives may be more diverse in their political beliefs than are liberals (Feldman & Johnston, 2014; Stern, 2005; Stenner, 2009). Fourth, we note for the curious reader that the collaborators on this article include one liberal, one centrist, two libertarians, one whose politics defy a simple left/right categorization, and one neo-positivist contrarian who favors a don't-ask-don't-tell policy in which scholarship should be judged on its merits. None identifies as conservative or Republican.
There are many academic fields in which surveys find self-identified conservatives to be about as numerous as self-identified liberals; typically business, computer science, engineering, health sciences, and technical/vocational fields (Zipp & Fenwick, 2006; Gross & Simmons, 2007) 2 . In the social sciences and humanities, however, there is a stronger imbalance. For instance, recent surveys find that 58 - 66 percent of social science professors in the United States identify as liberals, while only 5 - 8 percent identify as conservatives, and that self-identified Democrats outnumber Republicans by ratios of at least 8 to 1 (Gross & Simmons, 2007; Klein & Stern, 2009; Rothman & Lichter, 2008). A similar situation is found in the humanities where surveys find that 52 - 77 percent of humanities professors identify as liberals, while only 4 - 8 percent identify as conservatives, and that self-identified Democrats outnumber Republicans by ratios of at least 5:1 (Gross & Simmons, 2007; Rothman & Lichter, 2008). In psychology the imbalance is slightly stronger: 84 percent identify as liberal while only 8 percent identify as conservative (Gross & Simmons, 2007; Rothman & Lichter, 2008). That is a ratio of 10.5 to 1. In the United States as a whole, the ratio of liberals to conservatives is roughly 1 to 2 (Gallup, 2010).
In Figure 1 [pg52 https://i.imgur.com/LHE8UhQ.png ], we have plotted all available data points on the political identity of psychologists at American colleges and universities, including both party identification (diamonds) and liberal-conservative identification (circles). Both sets of measures show a strong left-ward movement. Psychology professors were as likely to report voting Republican as Democrat in presidential contests in the 1920s. From the 1930s through 1960, they were more likely to report voting for Democrats, but substantial minorities voted for Wilkie, Eisenhower, and Nixon (in 1960). By 2006, however, the ratio of Democrats to Republicans had climbed to more than 11:1 (Gross & Simmons, 2007; Rothman & Lichter, 2008). At the 2011 meeting in San Antonio, Texas, Jonathan Haidt asked the roughly 1,000 attendees to identify themselves politically with a show of hands. He counted the exact number of hands raised for the options "conservative or on the right" (3 hands), "moderate or centrist" (20 hands), and "libertarian" (12 hands). For the option "liberal or on the left," it was not possible to count, but he estimated that approximately 80% of the audience raised a hand (i.e., roughly 800 liberals). The corresponding liberal-conservative ratio of 267:1 is surely an overestimate; in this nonanonymous survey, many conservatives may have been reluctant to raise their hands. But if conservatives were disproportionately reluctant to self-identify, it illustrates the problem we are raising.
The other piece of evidence we have comes from an anonymous internet survey conducted by Inbar and Lammers (2012), who set out to test Haidt's claim that there were hardly any conservatives in social psychology. They sent an email invitation to the entire SPSP discussion list, from which 292 3 individuals participated. Inbar & Lammers found that 85 percent of these respondents declared themselves liberal, 9 percent moderate, and only 6 percent conservative 4 (a ratio of 14:1). Furthermore, the trend toward political homogeneity seems to be continuing: whereas 10% of faculty respondents self-identified as conservative, only 2% of graduate students and postdocs did so (Inbar, 2013, personal communication). This pattern is consistent with the broader trends throughout psychology illustrated in Figure 1: the field is shifting leftward, the ratio of liberals to conservatives is now greater than 10:1, and there are hardly any conservative students in the pipeline.
Example 1: Denial of environmental realities. Feygina, Jost and Goldsmith (2010) sought to explain the "denial of environmental realities" using system justification theory (Jost & Banaji, 1994). In operationalizing such denial, the authors assessed the four constructs listed below, with example items in parentheses:
Construct 1: Denial of the possibility of an ecological crisis ("If things continue on their present course, we will soon experience a major environmental catastrophe," reverse scored).
Construct 2: Denial of limits to growth ("The earth has plenty of natural resources if we just learn how to develop them.")
Construct 3: Denial of the need to abide by the constraints of nature ("Humans will eventually learn enough about how nature works to be able to control it.")
Construct 4: Denial of the danger of disrupting balance in nature ("The balance of nature is strong enough to cope with the impacts of modern industrial nations.")
The core problem with this research is that it misrepresents those who merely disagree with environmentalist values and slogans as being in "denial." Indeed, the papers Feygina et al (2010) cited in support of their "denial" questions never used the terms "deny" or "denial" to describe these measures. Clark, Kotchen, and Moore (2003) referred to the items as assessing "attitudes" and Dunlap, Van Liere, Mertig, and Jones (2000) characterized the items as tapping "primitive beliefs" (p. 439) about the environment.
...Whether some people deny actual environmental realities, and if so, why, remains an interesting and potentially scientifically tractable question. For example, one might assess "environmental denial" by showing people a time-lapse video taken over several years showing ocean levels rising over an island, and asking people if sea levels were rising. There would be a prima facie case for identifying those who answered "no" to such a question as "denying environmental realities." However, Feygina et al. (2010) did not perform such studies. Instead, they simply measured support for primitive environmentalist beliefs and values, called low levels of such support denial, and regressed it on the system justification scores and other measures (a third, experimental study, did not assess denial). None of Feygina et al.'s (2010) measures refer to environmental realities. Thus, the studies were not capable of producing scientific evidence of denial of environmental realities.
Example 2: Ideology and unethical behavior. Son Hing, Bobocel, Zanna, and McBride (2007) found that: 1) people high in social dominance orientation (SDO) were more likely to make unethical decisions, 2) people high in right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) were more likely to go along with the unethical decisions of leaders, and 3) dyads with high SDO leaders and high RWA followers made more unethical decisions than dyads with alternative arrangements (e.g., low SDO-low RWA dyads).
Yet consider the decisions they defined as unethical: not formally taking a female colleague's side in her sexual harassment complaint against her subordinate (given little information about the case), and a worker placing the well-being of his or her company above unspecified harms to the environment attributed to the company's operations. Liberal values of feminism and environmentalism were embedded directly into the operationalization of ethics, even to the extent that participants were expected to endorse those values in vignettes that lacked the information one would need to make a considered judgment.
Turnabout tests often constitute a simple tool for identifying and avoiding embedded values bias (Tetlock, 1994). Imagine a counterfactual social psychology field in which conservative political views were treated as "scientific facts" and disagreements with conservative views treated as denial or error. In this field, scholars might regularly publish studies on "the denial of the benefits of free market capitalism" or "the denial of the benefits of a strong military" or "the denial of the benefits of church attendance." Or, they might publish studies showing that people low in RWA and SDO (i.e., liberals) are more unethical because they are more willing to disrespect authority, disregard private property, and restrict voluntary individual choice in the marketplace. Embedding any type of ideological values into measures is dangerous to science.
Example 1: Stereotype accuracy. Since the 1930s, social psychologists have been proclaiming the inaccuracy of social stereotypes, despite lacking evidence of such inaccuracy. Evidence has seemed unnecessary because stereotypes have been, in effect, stereotyped as inherently nasty and inaccurate (see Jussim, 2012a for a review).
Some group stereotypes are indeed hopelessly crude and untestable. But some may rest on valid empiricism-and represent subjective estimates of population characteristics (e.g. the proportion of people who drop out of high school, are victims of crime, or endorse policies that support women at work, see Jussim, 2012a, Ryan, 2002 for reviews). In this context, it is not surprising that the rigorous empirical study of the accuracy of factual stereotypes was initiated by one of the very few self-avowed conservatives in social psychology-Clark McCauley (McCauley & Stitt, 1978). Since then, dozens of studies by independent researchers have yielded evidence that stereotype accuracy (of all sorts of stereotypes) is one of the most robust effects in all of social psychology ([Jussim, L. (2012a). Social perception and social reality: Why accuracy dominates bias and self-fulfilling prophecy http://gen.lib.rus.ec/get?md5=b1e521e63710cfed147bf3885dfb25ca New York: Oxford University Press.]). Here is a clear example of the value of political diversity: a conservative social psychologist asked a question nobody else thought (or dared) to ask, and found results that continue to make many social psychologists uncomfortable. McCauley's willingness to put the assumption of stereotype inaccuracy to an empirical test led to the correction of one of social psychology's most longstanding errors.
Example 2: The scope and direction of prejudice. Prejudice and intolerance have long been considered the province of the political right (e.g., Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, & Sanford, 1950; Duckitt, 2001; Lindner & Nosek, 2009). Indeed, since Allport (1954), social psychologists have suspected that there is a personality type associated with generalized prejudice toward a variety of social groups (Akrami, Ekehammar, & Bergh, 2011), which they have linked to political conservatism (Roets & van Hiel, 2011). More recently, however, several scholars have noted that the groups typically considered targets of prejudice in such research programs are usually low status and often left-leaning (e.g., African-Americans and Communists; for more examples and further arguments, see Chambers, Schlenker & Collisson, 2013 and Crawford & Pilanski, 2013). Using research designs that include both left-leaning and right-leaning targets, and using nationally representative as well as student and community samples, these researchers have demonstrated that prejudice is potent on both the left and right. Conservatives are prejudiced against stereotypically left-leaning targets (e.g., AfricanAmericans), whereas liberals are prejudiced against stereotypically right-leaning targets (e.g., religious Christians; see Chambers et al., 2013; Crawford & Pilanski, 2013; Wetherell, Brandt, & Reyna, 2013).
Summarizing these recent findings, Brandt, Reyna, Chambers, Crawford, and Wetherell (2014) put forward the ideological conflict hypothesis, which posits that people across the political spectrum are prejudiced against ideologically dissimilar others. Once again, the shared moral narrative of social psychology seems to have restricted the range of research: the investigation of prejudice was long limited to prejudice against the targets that liberals care most about. But the presence of a non-liberal researcher (John Chambers is a libertarian) led to an expansion of the range of targets, which might, over time, lead the entire field to a more nuanced view of the relationship between politics and prejudice.
Instead of assuming that stereotypes are inaccurate without citing evidence, ask, "How (in)accurate are stereotypes? What has empirical research found?" Instead of asking, "Why are conservatives so prejudiced and politically intolerant?" (Hodson & Busseri, 2012; Lindner & Nosek, 2009), ask, "Which groups are targets of prejudice and intolerance across the political spectrum, and why?" (Brandt et al., 2014). One does not need to be politically conservative to ask the latter questions. Indeed, one of the authors of the ideological conflict hypothesis (Crawford) self-describes as liberal.
A long-standing view in social-political psychology is that the right is more dogmatic and intolerant of ambiguity than the left, a view Tetlock (1983) dubbed the rigidity-of-the-right hypothesis. Altemeyer (1996; 1998) argued that a consequence of this asymmetry in rigidity is that those on the right (specifically, people high in RWA) should be more prone to making biased political judgment than those on the left. For example, Altemeyer (1996) found that people high in RWA were biased in favor of Christian over Muslim mandatory school prayer in American and Arab public schools, respectively, whereas people low in RWA opposed mandatory school prayer regardless of the religious target group...But had social psychologists studied a broad enough range of situations to justify these broad conclusions? Recent evidence suggests not. The ideologically objectionable premise model (IOPM; Crawford, 2012) posits that people on the political left and right are equally likely to approach political judgments with their ideological blinders on. That said, they will only do so when the premise of a political judgment is ideologically acceptable. If it's objectionable, any preferences for one group over another will be short-circuited, and biases won't emerge. The IOPM thus allows for biases to emerge only among liberals, only among conservatives, or among both liberals and conservatives, depending on the situation. For example, reinterpreting Altemeyer's mandatory school prayer results, Crawford (2012) argued that for people low in RWA who value individual freedom and autonomy, mandatory school prayer is objectionable; thus, the very nature of the judgment should shut off any biases in favor of one target over the other. However, for people high in RWA who value society-wide conformity to traditional morals and values, mandating school prayer is acceptable; this acceptable premise then allows for people high in RWA to express a bias in favor of Christian over Muslim school prayer. Crawford (2012, Study 1) replaced mandatory prayer with voluntary prayer, which would be acceptable to both people high and low in RWA. In line with the IOPM, people high in RWA were still biased in favor of Christian over Muslim prayer, while people low in RWA now showed a bias in favor of Muslim over Christian voluntary prayer.
In another study, Crawford (2012, Study 2) reasoned that the left typically finds it acceptable to criticize and question authority. Therefore, a scenario involving a subordinate criticizing an authority figure would permit people low in RWA to punish a subordinate who criticizes an ideologically similar leader (e.g., President Barack Obama) more harshly than one who criticizes an ideologically dissimilar leader (e.g., President George W. Bush). However, such criticism of authority represents an objectionable premise for people high in RWA-thus, they should punish the subordinate equally, regardless of the leader's identity. Consistent with the IOPM, people low in RWA more harshly punished a military general who criticized Obama than one who criticized Bush, whereas people high in RWA punished the general equally regardless of the target leader's identity. Thus, this scenario shows the reversal of Altemeyer's findings-biases emerged among the left, but not the right. Results from seven scenarios have supported the ideologically objectionable premise model (see Crawford, 2012; Crawford & Xhambazi, 2013) and indicate that biased political judgments are not predicted by ideological orientation (as per Altemeyer), but rather by the qualities of the judgment scenarios used in the research.
Several programs of research have found evidence of strengths and weaknesses among both liberals and conservatives, including moral foundations theory (e.g., Haidt, 2012), the ideologically objectionable premise model (Crawford, 2012; Crawford & Xhambazi, in press), and the ideological conflict hypothesis (e.g., Brandt et al., 2014; Crawford, Modri, & Motyl, 2013; Munro, Lasane, & Leary, 2010).
It is extremely difficult to avoid confirmation bias in everyday reasoning; for example, courses in "critical thinking" temporarily suppress confirmation bias, but do not eliminate it (Lilienfeld, Ammirati, & Landfield, 2009). Even research communities of highly intelligent and well-meaning individuals can fall prey to confirmation bias, as IQ is positively correlated with the number of reasons people find to support their own side in an argument, and is uncorrelated with the (much lower) number of reasons people find to support the opposing argument (Perkins, Farady & Bushey, 1991).
There is even evidence that politically diverse teams produce more creative solutions than do politically homogeneous teams on problems such as "how can a person of average talent achieve fame" and how to find funding for a partially-built church ineligible for bank loans (Triandis, Hall, & Ewen, 1965). Pairs constituting one liberal and one conservative produced more creative solutions to these problems than did liberal-liberal or conservative-conservative pairings.
Second, the observed relationship between intelligence and conservatism largely depends on how conservatism is operationalized. Social conservatism correlates with lower cognitive ability test scores, but economic conservatism correlates with higher scores (Iyer, Koleva, Graham, Ditto, & Haidt, 2012; Kemmelmeier 2008). Similarly, Feldman and Johnston (2014) find in multiple nationally representative samples that social conservatism negatively predicted educational attainment, whereas economic conservatism positively predicted educational attainment. Together, these results likely explain why both Heaven et al. (2011) and Hodson and Busseri (2012) found a negative correlation between IQ and conservatism-because "conservatism" was operationalized as Right-Wing Authoritarianism, which is more strongly related to social than economic conservatism (van Hiel et al., 2004). In fact, Carl (2014) found that Republicans have higher mean verbal intelligence (up to 5.48 IQ points equivalent, when covariates are excluded), and this effect is driven by economic conservatism (which, as a European, he called economic liberalism, because of its emphasis on free markets). Carl suggests that libertarian Republicans overpower the negative correlation between social conservatism and verbal intelligence, to yield the aggregate mean advantage for Republicans. Moreover, the largest political effect in Kemmelmeier's (2008) study was the positive correlation between anti-regulation views and SAT-V scores, where β = .117, p < .001 (by comparison, the regression coefficient for conservatism was β = −.088, p < .01, and for being African American, β = −.169, p < .001)
There is little evidence that education causes students to become more liberal. Instead, several longitudinal studies following tens of thousands of college students for many years have concluded that political socialization in college occurs primarily as a function of one's peers, not education per se (Astin, 1993; Dey, 1997).
The Big-5 trait that correlates most strongly with political liberalism is openness to experience (r = .32 in Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski, & Sulloways's 2003 meta-analysis), and people high in that trait are more likely to pursue careers that will let them indulge their curiosity and desire to learn, such as a career in the academy (McCrae, 1996). An academic career requires a Ph.D., and liberals enter (and graduate) college more interested in pursuing Ph.D.s than do conservatives (Woessner & Kelly-Woessner, 2009). Furthermore, the personal and intellectual priorities of liberals may predispose them to an academic career: relative to conservatives, they are less interested in financial success and more interested in writing original works and making a theoretical contribution to science (Woessner & Kelly-Woessner, 2009).
Self-selection clearly plays a role [in why liberals are overrepresented in psychology]. But it would be ironic if an epistemic community resonated to empirical arguments that appear to exonerate the community of prejudice-when that same community roundly rejects those same arguments when invoked by other institutions to explain the under-representation of women or ethnic minorities (e.g., in STEM disciplines or other elite professions). Gross (2013) relied heavily on self-reports of members of the target group suspected of prejudice. But cognitive psychologists and legal scholars such as Greenwald and Krieger (2006), and Kang and Banaji (2006) argue that this type of evidence is insensitive to unconscious prejudices which, they insist, are pervasive when carefully assessed in controlled lab environments...In our view, it is disturbing when the thresholds of proof that behavioral and social scientists use in evaluating claims of prejudice hinge on "whose ox is being gored" (Tetlock & Mitchell, 2009).
...Might self-selection be amplified by an accurate perception among conservative students that they are not welcome in the social psychology community? Consider the narrative of conservatives that can be formed from some recent conclusions in social psychological research: compared to liberals, conservatives are less intelligent (Hodson & Busseri, 2012) and less cognitively complex (Jost et al., 2003). They are more rigid, dogmatic, and inflexible (Jost et al., 2003). Their lower IQ explains their racism and sexism (Deary, Batty, & Gale, 2008), and their endorsement of inequality explains why they are happier than liberals (Napier & Jost, 2008). They are hyper-responsive to threatening and negative stimuli (Hibbing, Smith, & Alford, 2013; Oxley et al., 2008), and they adopt their political beliefs in part to assuage their fears and anxieties (Jost et al., 2003). These conclusions do not remain confined to academic journals; they are widely reported in the press and in popular books about why conservatives deny science (e.g., Mooney, 2012; Tuschman, 2013).
Evidence of hostile climate is not just anecdotal. Inbar and Lammers (2012) asked members of the SPSP discussion list: "Do you feel that there is a hostile climate towards your political beliefs in your field?" Of 17 conservatives, 14 (82%) responded "yes" (i.e., a response at or above the midpoint of the scale, where the midpoint was labeled "somewhat" and the top point "very much"), with half of those responding "very much." In contrast, only 18 of 266 liberals (7%) responded "yes", with only two of those responding "very much." Interestingly, 18 of 25 moderates (72%) responded "yes," with one responding "very much."
Abramowitz et al. (1975) asked research psychologists to rate the suitability of a manuscript for publication. The methods and analyses were held identical for all reviewers; however, the result was experimentally varied between-subjects to suggest either that a group of leftist political activists on a college campus were mentally healthier-or that they were less healthy-than a comparison group of non-activists. When the leftist activists were said to be healthier, the more liberal reviewers rated the manuscript as more publishable, and the statistical analyses as more adequate, than when the otherwise identical manuscript reported that the activists were less mentally healthy. The less liberal reviewers showed no such bias. (Abramowitz et al. did not identify any conservative reviewers.)
But Inbar and Lammers (2012) found that most social psychologists who responded to their survey were willing to explicitly state that they would discriminate against conservatives. Their survey posed the question: "If two job candidates (with equal qualifications) were to apply for an opening in your department, and you knew that one was politically quite conservative, do you think you would be inclined to vote for the more liberal one?" Of the 237 liberals, only 42 (18%) chose the lowest scale point, "not at all." In other words, 82% admitted that they would be at least a little bit prejudiced against a conservative candidate, and 43% chose the midpoint ("somewhat") or above. In contrast, the majority of moderates (67%) and conservatives (83%) chose the lowest scale point ("not at all"). Inbar and Lammers (2012) assessed explicit willingness to discriminate in other ways as well, all of which told the same story: when reviewing a grant, 82% of liberals admitted at least a trace of bias, and 27% chose "somewhat" or above; when reviewing a paper, 78% admitted at least a trace of bias, and 21% chose "somewhat" or above; and when inviting participants to a symposium, 56% of liberals admitted at least a trace of bias, and 15% chose "somewhat" or above."