Partisan Bias and Its Discontents

Abstract

The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. AbstractBaron and Jost (this issue) present three critiques of our meta-analysis demonstrating similar levels of partisan bias in liberals and conservatives: 1) that the studies we examined were biased toward finding symmetrical bias among liberals and conservatives, 2) that the studies we examined do not measure partisan bias but rather rational Bayesian updating, and 3) that social psychology is not biased in favor of liberals but biased instead toward creating false equivalencies. We respond in turn that: 1) the included studies covered a wide variety of issues at the core of contemporary political conflict and fairly compared bias by establishing conditions under which both liberals and conservatives would have similar motivations and opportunity to demonstrate bias, 2) we carefully selected studies that were least vulnerable to Bayesian counterexplanation and most scientists and laypeople consider these studies demonstrations of bias, and 3) there is reason to be vigilant about liberal bias in social psychology, but this does not preclude concern about other possible biases, all of which threaten good science. We close with recommendations for future research and urge researchers to move beyond broad generalizations of political differences that are insensitive to time and context.

Shared Partisanship Dramatically Increases Social Tie Formation in a Twitter Field Experiment

“…This is of substantial theoretical significance, given the large body of existing survey work coupled with lack of field experiments outside the context of romantic relationships (9). Furthermore, our results contribute to ongoing debates about asymmetries in partisan bias (13,14). In contrast to the suggestions of some observational work (12), we find that Democrats and Republicans in our sample are equally likely to favor co-partisan strangers when forming new social ties.…”

Worldview conflict and prejudice

“…The social capital and financial resources of high status and conventional groups may offset the effects of prejudice directed at these groups, just as perceived social support appears to buffer the negative effects of stigma (e.g., Beals, Peplau, & Gable, 2009). In this way, our work suggests that although there is a psychological equivalence between different worldviews when it comes to prejudice, this psychological equivalence is not the same, nor does it imply, moral equivalence (see also Ditto et al, 2019b).…”

Anger and Authoritarianism Mediate the Effects of Fear on Support for the Far Right—What Vasilopoulos et al. (2019) Really Found

“…They show that the relationship between fear and right-wing orientation was positive, rather than negative (r [22,777] = 0.1038, p <.001), and so was the relationship between fear and authoritarianism (r [24,325] = 0.1748, p <.001), although these relationships were not reported in the original article. And-for those who remain skeptical, despite decades of evidence, about the existence of an "elective affinity" between authoritarianism and right-wing orientation (e.g., Conway, Houck, Gornick, & Repke, 2018;Ditto et al, 2019)-it is worth pointing out that these two variables were quite strongly correlated in the context of this very large, nationally representative survey in France (r [22,777] = 0.2284, p <.001). In addition, fear was positively correlated with rightist political orientation (or negatively correlated with leftist orientation), measured in terms of ideological self-placement (r [22,777] = 0.1038, p <.001).…”