Political Diversity in Social and Personality Psychology

Abstract

Political diversity in social and personality psychologyInbar, Y.; Lammers, J. General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights.-Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research -You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain -You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal Take down policyIf you believe that this document breaches copyright, please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Research in social and personality psychology often bears directly on important political debates. Social-personality psychologists have studied the nature of prejudice and discrimination (Allport, 1954), the origins of ideology (Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski, & Sulloway, 2003), and the intuitive underpinnings of people's moral convictions (Haidt, 2001). Thus, the political beliefs of researchers can have large consequences for research. Critics have argued that social-personality psychologists are overwhelmingly politically liberal (left-wing) and that this lack of diversity leads to ideologically biased selection of research questions, selective interpretation of evidence, and even to discrimination against conservative (right-wing) students and faculty (Haidt, 2011;Redding, 2001;Tetlock, 1994).This issue seems to recur roughly every 10 years-most recently, in a provocative talk given by Jonathan Haidt (2011) at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP; APA Division 8). During his talk, Haidt asked the political conservatives present to raise their hands. In an audience of more than 1,000, only three hands went up. Haidt also described two other attempts he had made to locate conservatives in social psychology: searching the web using the term "conservative social psychologist" and asking 30 social psychologists to name a conservative colleague. Combined, these latter two methods uncovered one conservative social psychologist. Following earlier critics of psychology's liberal bias, Haidt argued that this "statistically impossible lack of diversity" has serious negative consequences, including the unwillingness to consider "taboo" hypotheses and discrimination against politically conservative students. Haidt suggested setting the explicit goal that 10% of SPSP members be political conservatives by 2020. The Political Ideology of Social and Personality PsychologistsWhether one agrees or disagrees with this goal, it is clearly a problem that we know so few of the relevant facts. First, we have little reliable data on the political ideology of socialpersonality psychologists. Haidt's (2011) demonstration shows that very few are ...

The Liberal and Conservative Experience Across Academic Disciplines: An Extension of Inbar and Lammers

“…The proportion of males in the current study (57.4%) was higher than among the personality and social psychologists (46.4%) in Inbar and Lammers (2012), possibly due to the inclusion of faculty in disciplines with higher proportions of males. 3 Unlike Inbar and…”

“…Parallel to the findings of Inbar and Lammers (2012), the current respondents were more likely to characterize themselves as social liberals than economic or foreign policy liberals. Further, significant correlations were found between self-rankings on social and economic issues, r (580) = .67, 95% …”

“…According to Inbar and Lammers (2012), this lack of political diversity should not be of concern "if one believes that conservatives are simply wrong" (p. 502). We wouldn't expect a department of anthropology to hire a professor who believes that dinosaurs and humans were alive at the same time.…”

“…Past research on political intolerance and prejudice has focused primarily on conservatives, labeling them as rigid or intolerant (e.g., Sibley & Duckitt, 2008), but like Inbar and Lammers (2012), these conclusions might be limited by a failure to provide a baseline of intolerance occurring among liberals. The proposed simultaneous investigation of the conservative and liberal experience takes a more comprehensive approach by exploring an alternative hypothesis.…”

“…We hypothesized that the findings of Inbar and Lammers (2012) would be replicated in the broader sample, and that the experience of self-reported liberals and conservatives might differ due to their suspected majority versus minority status.…”