The Ideology of Social Psychologists (and Why it Matters)

We (Yoel Inbar and John Jost) were asked by SPSP to write short opinion pieces about why social-personality psychologists are predominantly liberal and what, if anything, should be done about it. We were also asked to keep our pieces under 500 words. As you can see, we did not succeed in this respect, but we hope that by going somewhat over our allotted space, we were able to more clearly articulate where we agree and disagree about these issues. We also believe that the stakes justify it -- we write this one day before the midterm elections and in the midst of an extraordinary time in U.S. politics. Right now, trustworthy social science research on politically charged topics is vital. We hope that the SPSP membership finds this exchange useful and welcome any constructive comments. In a future issue of the newsletter, we plan to write something together to lay out even more explicitly our areas of agreement and disagreement. Read John Jost's piece here.

“[They] have strong ideological views, high levels of engagement with political issues, and the highest levels of education and socioeconomic status. Their own circumstances are secure [but] they are highly sensitive to issues of fairness and equity in society, particularly regarding race, gender, and other minority group identities. Their emphasis on unjust power structures leads them to be very pessimistic about fairness in America. They are uncomfortable with nationalism and ambivalent about America’s role in the world.”

Does this sound like you and your colleagues? If so, you are not unusual. The paragraph above comes from a recent study of American politics (Hawkins, Yudkin, Juan-Torres, & Dixon, 2018). The researchers estimate that it describes about 9% of Americans, but it likely describes a far larger percentage of social psychologists.[1] In a survey of SPSP members, for example, Inbar & Lammers (2012; Study 2) found that 85% of the sample described themselves as liberal “overall”; only 6% described themselves as conservative. Likewise, in a survey of 335 members of the Society for Experimental Social Psychology (SESP), von Hippel and Buss (2017) found that less than 2% described themselves as conservative. Only four said that they had supported the Republican candidate, Mitt Romney, in the (then) latest US Presidential election, compared to the 305 who supported Barack Obama (making for a roughly 75-to-1 ratio in favor of Obama). In fact, the field’s overwhelmingly left-wing tilt is disputed by no one I know—by and large, we belong to the same political tribe. The dispute is about whether this a problem. There are (at least) two arguments that it is not: one empirical, one moral.

The empirical argument is that we (social psychologists) are scientists, and so are protected from our political biases by our scientific training. As scientists, we will impartially seek to uncover the truth, regardless of our personal preferences. I believe that this argument is far too optimistic. Like other humans, scientists are susceptible to motivated reasoning. When our scientific research touches on our political convictions, these convictions will predictably affect our research. Just to choose a few examples, our ideological values affect what we think needs explaining (e.g., conservative beliefs require explanations whereas liberal beliefs do not; Brandt & Spälti, 2017). They affect how we define and measure politically relevant constructs (e.g., operationalizing the ostensibly content-neutral constructs of “prejudice” and “intolerance” only as prejudice and intolerance against groups politically sympathetic to the left; Brandt, Reyna, Chambers, Crawford, & Wetherell, 2014; Crawford, 2017). And they affect what empirical claims we are inclined to scrutinize or accept less critically (e.g., claims about stereotype accuracy versus inaccuracy; Jussim, 2012). An appeal to scientific impartiality thus needs to reckon with a demonstrated history of partiality in our research. Furthermore, I think the impartiality argument is mistaken even in principle. Science converges on truth not because individual scientists are impartial, but because the norms of science mitigate individual biases by institutionalizing vigorous debate and criticism (Merton, 1942). The less vigorous the debate (say, because taking one side would incur social and professional costs) the greater the risk of biased research.

Separately, there is a moral argument. According to this argument, left-wing views are simply more morally correct than right-wing views, and we ought to be endorsing them in our work (note that although this isn’t, strictly speaking, logically incompatible with the previous argument, it does seem incompatible in spirit). Here I think it depends on what the views in question are. I am confident that Nazis are morally mistaken (and no one I’m aware of says we need more of them in social psychology). I am less confident that the progressive worldview described above is more correct than the conservative alternative in every detail, especially when the correctness of the progressive worldview is argued to justify excluding people from the field. Our beliefs come from a complex combination of our backgrounds, personalities, and immediate social environments, as well as the broader current political moment—so it would be extremely surprising if we happened to be the group that got everything more right than anyone else did. In fact, you don’t have to go back very far to find examples of once-dominant left-wing beliefs that now seem somewhat silly. For example, many second-wave feminists saw the idea of psychological differences between men and women as anathema, and research demonstrating such differences was strongly opposed by many on the left (Eagly, 1995). For most present-day readers, the idea that men and women differ on average in psychologically meaningful ways probably seems obvious (in fact, such difference are often cited as a benefit of gender diversity). It’s quite likely that some of the things we currently think are obviously true will seem equally silly (or perhaps even immoral) in another 30 years (though there’s of course no way of knowing which ones those will be).

The question of what to do about our ideological imbalance is a separate and more difficult one—and I won’t attempt a full answer here. We should recognize, though, that at least some of the status quo is due to deliberate exclusion, that is, to explicit bias. A substantial number of social psychologists say that they would discriminate against non-liberals (Inbar & Lammers, 2012), and non-liberal social psychologists say that they have been discriminated against by their colleagues (Stevens et al., 2017). Discrimination is not the only explanation—there are likely also differences in values and preferences that cause non-liberals to select out of academia (Gross & Fosse, 2012)—but (as the experiences of non-liberals attest) some discrimination is undeniably happening. As the field’s current ideological imbalance is demonstrably bad for our science and can’t be justified on moral grounds, recognizing and reducing explicit discrimination seems like a reasonable first step.

References

Brandt, M. & Spälti, A. K. (2017). Norms and explanation in social psychology. In J. T. Crawford & L. Jussim (Eds.), The Politics of Social Psychology (pp. 26-43). New York: Psychology Press.

Brandt, M. J., Reyna, C., Chambers, J. R., Crawford, J. T., & Wetherell, G. (2014). The ideological-conflict hypothesis: Intolerance among both liberals and conservatives. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 23, 27–34.

Crawford, J. T. (2017). The politics of the psychology of prejudice. In J. T. Crawford & L. Jussim (Eds.), The Politics of Social Psychology (pp. 99-115). New York: Psychology Press.

Eagly, A. H. (1995). The science and politics of comparing women and men. American Psychologist, 50, 145-158.

Gross, N., & Fosse, E. (2012). Why are professors liberal? Theory and Society, 41, 127-168.

Hawkins, S., Yudkin, D., Juan-Torres, M., & Dixon, T. (2018). Hidden Tribes: A Study of America’s Polarized Landscape. New York: More in Common.

Inbar, Y., & Lammers, J. (2012). Political diversity in social and personality psychology. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 7, 496-503.

Jussim, L. (2012). Social Perception and Social Reality: Why Accuracy Dominates Bias and Self-Fulfilling Prophecy. New York: Oxford.

Merton, R. K. (1942/1973). The normative structure of science. In The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Stevens, S.T., Jussim, L., Anglin, S.M., Contrada, R., Welch, C.A., Labrecque, J.A., et al. (2018).  Political exclusion and discrimination in social psychology: Lived experiences and solutions.  In J.T. Crawford and L. Jussim (Eds.), The Politics of Social Psychology (pp. 210-244).

Von Hippel, W., & Buss, D.M. (2017). Do ideologically driven scientific agendas impede understanding and acceptance of evolutionary principles in social psychology? In J. T. Crawford & L. Jussim (Eds.), The Politics of Social Psychology (pp. 7-25). New York: Psychology Press.

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