Survey Exposes Liberal Bias Among Psychologists

Everybody except liberals knows they are intolerant of conservatives, but now a new survey won’t let them deny they have a real bias problem.

Conservatives in academia have long been aware that for their own protection they need to keep their views quiet.  Liberals, however, walk around thinking of themselves as the most tolerant people in the world.  An anonymous online survey of 800 social psychologists, about to be published by Yoel Inbar and Joris Lammers this month in Perspectives on Psychological Science (a journal of the Association for Psychological Science), caught social psychologists with their tolerant pants down, Science Daily just reported.  Here are some of the most revealing excerpts:

Every ten years or so, someone will make the observation that there is a lack of political diversity among psychological scientists and a discussion about what ought to be done ensues.  The notion that the field discriminates against and is skewed toward a liberal political perspective is worthy of concern; scholars, both within and outside the field, have offered various solutions to this diversity problem.

Their findings confirm the field’s liberal bias, but they reveal some surprises as well…. Inbar and Lammers found an overwhelming liberal majority when it concerned social issues, but greater diversity on economic and foreign policy issues.

It seems that conservative social psychologists hide their views because they perceive the field as hostile to their values. The more conservative respondents were, the more likely they were to report that they had experienced an intellectually unfriendly climate. Importantly, self-defined liberals did not seem to have the same perceptions of hostility.

Furthermore, liberal respondents were more likely to say that they would discriminate against psychologists who displayed clear conservative views in the context of a paper or grant review, a symposium invitation, and in faculty hiring.

Social tolerance and fairness are important values for many psychological scientists, so it’s surprising to find intolerance of a different kind in the field. And despite the fact that psychological scientists are well aware of the potentially harmful effects of cognitive biases, they are clearly not immune to such biases themselves.

Several of the commentaries raise serious questions about how ideology might be shaping the issues and questions that social psychologists systematically choose — and do not choose — to explore.

It may be the case that the field attracts a certain kind of inquiring and open mind that tends to embrace liberal values, and that conservatives self-select out of the field.  But this, most of the commentators agree, does not change the fact that pervasive liberal bias is unhealthy for intellectual inquiry.

The article ends with Inbar and Lammers declaring the “time is ripe for self-examination in the field.”

The time is ripe for housecleaning, not just navel-gazing.  Nothing will change until parity is achieved.  These people lack self-awareness of their intolerance because the only ones they hang out with are people like themselves.  They have no idea about how they stifle true diversity and open debate by their cluelessness, engendered by self-fulfilling prophecies and group reinforcement. Watch the documentary Indoctrinate U – it’s about campus leftist idealogues so pathetically unself-aware, they are downright funny.

Don’t fall for the baloney that conservatives self-select out of the field because they lack an “inquiring and open mind.”  That’s leftist hot air.  Notice, instead, that the leftist bias actually influences the very scientific questions they find worthy to explore!  That’s why you so often find social psychologists analyzing religious people instead of conservative psychologists analyzing leftists.  We need more studies on leftism as a mental disorder that produces delusions of tolerance.

Notice that some of the social psychos in the survey even admitted they would discriminate against conservatives!  They would prevent them from getting hired or getting grants or tenure.  Well, duh!  No wonder they’re all leftists.

Since social psychologists are overwhelmingly Darwinians, this undoubtedly includes Darwin skeptics, who have felt their wrath and found themselves among the ranks of The Expelled.  Ironically, you can bet on it that their universities or institutions have a written policy on “diversity and inclusion” – about as worthless as a UN committee on anti-terrorism run by jihadis.  Your commentator had to take a campus-wide quiz on “diversity and inclusion” at a scientific institution, only to find himself expelled a few years later by the organization’s intolerance of intelligent design.

Someone show this article to radio talk show host Dennis Prager, who has often beat the drum about the blindness of leftists in academia (he prefers calling them “leftists” instead of “liberal”–a good word misused).  Prager recently stated wisely that leftists are incapable of love, because they are not intolerant of evil.  It takes intolerance of evil to produce true love.  Celebrate “tolerance” without a hatred for evil, and the hate gets directed at those who don’t buy into the groupthink.

For an explanation of why tolerance is impossible as a universal standard of virtue, see the Baloney Detector on “Self-Refuting Fallacy.“