{"id":28553,"date":"2014-11-07T00:02:39","date_gmt":"2014-11-07T05:02:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=28553"},"modified":"2014-11-05T22:34:29","modified_gmt":"2014-11-06T03:34:29","slug":"good-topic-for-a-psychology-paper-is-the-field-of-psychology-biased","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2014\/11\/07\/good-topic-for-a-psychology-paper-is-the-field-of-psychology-biased\/","title":{"rendered":"Good topic for a psychology paper – does the field of psychology suffer from political bias?"},"content":{"rendered":"

In The Atlantic<\/em>, Maria Konnikova<\/a> discusses the idea of pre-existing political bias in the field of psychology:<\/p>\n

On January 27, 2011, from a stage in the middle of the San Antonio Convention Center, Jonathan Haidt addressed<\/a> the participants of the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. The topic was an ambitious one: a vision for social psychology in the year 2020. Haidt began by reviewing the field that he is best known for, moral psychology. Then he threw a curveball. He would, he told the gathering of about a thousand social-psychology professors, students, and post-docs, like some audience participation. By a show of hands, how would those present describe their political orientation? First came the liberals: a \u201csea of hands,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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. \u201cIt\u2019s not like the whole field is undercut, but when it comes to research on controversial topics, the effect is most pronounced,\u201d he later told me. (Haidt has now put his remarks in more formal terms, complete with data, in a paper forthcoming<\/a> this winter in Behavioral and Brain Sciences<\/em>.)<\/p>\n

Haidt was far from<\/a> the first<\/a> to voice concern over the liberal slant in academia, broadly speaking, and in social psychology in particular. He was, however, the first to do it quite so visibly \u2014 and the reactions were vocal. At first, Haidt was pleased. \u201cPeople responded very constructively,\u201d he said. \u201cThey listened carefully, took it seriously. That speaks very well for the field. I\u2019ve never felt as if raising this issue has made me into a pariah or damaged me in any way.\u201d For the most part, his colleagues have continued to support his claims \u2014 or, at least, the need to investigate them further. Some, however, reacted with indignation.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In The Atlantic, Maria Konnikova discusses the idea of pre-existing political bias in the field of psychology: On January 27, 2011, from a stage in the middle of the San Antonio Convention Center, Jonathan Haidt addressed the participants of the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. The topic was an ambitious […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[53,73],"tags":[139,513],"class_list":["post-28553","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-randomness","tag-psychology","tag-research"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-7qx","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28553","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28553"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28553\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28556,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28553\/revisions\/28556"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}