I agree with Duarte et al. that there is prejudice against conservatives and that there might be significant scientific and social gains from having more conservatives in the field.
The analogy to the entry of East Asians into the field is salient to me. East Asians have profoundly changed our understanding of the nature of the self and the relation of the self to larger groups, including society. They have also powerfully influenced our thinking about cognition. Eastern holistic thinking is at base enormously different from logical, analytic thinking. It solves some problems that analytic thinking can't.
Eastern views generate theories that would not likely come from a purely Western orientation. And the two traditions provide vantage points for critiquing each other's social practices and cognitive habits. I believe something like the same thing might be true if the social and behavioral sciences were to include larger numbers of conservatives. It would increase the range and nature of social and behavioral theories and provide valuable criticism.
As a liberal, there is another reason I want to increase the number of conservatives in the field. I want us to affect the social and political thought of conservative intellectuals and politicians. Some conservative positions are simply untenable in light of well-established social psychological theory. It's enough to mention the fundamental attribution error. There are also opportunities for affecting social policy. A frequent conservative impulse is to reject any proposed intervention because there could be unforeseen damaging effects or “negative externalities.” Social psychologists well understand these concerns, but we also have theories that can help to avoid untoward consequences, and we have methods that can test interventions before they become adopted on a large scale.
How severe is the prejudice against conservatives? As Duarte et al. acknowledge, it's hard to know because it's clear that at least a part of the reason for few of them being in the field is self-selection on the basis of interests. But there is no question that conservative students might be turned off in part by professors asserting views they believe to be supported by theory and research but which in fact are merely readouts of liberal ideology. And sometimes professors express outright contempt for conservative views, which aside from being rude, lowers our credibility with sensible people of all political persuasions.
But I doubt that we are turning away many potential graduate students with a conservative bent. For the foreseeable future, self-selection based on interests, combined with distaste for the liberal ideology of the field, will result in few conservatives applying to graduate school. And a conservative eager to apply to graduate school would undoubtedly know it would be unwise to reveal conservative beliefs in an application.
How about conservative PhDs trying to join social science faculties? Would they find it difficult to get a job? I don't doubt that a conservative political stance would be a disadvantage, but I object to the purported evidence on the point presented by Duarte et al. The Inbar and Lammers (Reference Inbar and Lammers2012) poll is flawed. The investigators asked a large number of social psychologists, “If two job candidates (with equal qualifications) were to apply for an opening in your department, and you knew that one was politically quite conservative, do you think you would be inclined to vote for the more liberal one?” The end point on the scale was labeled “not at all.” Only by checking that endpoint could respondents show they had no prejudice against conservatives. The possibility that the respondent might be inclined to be biased in favor of the conservative candidate was not taken seriously or perhaps not even considered. Moreover, we know that scale-point labels can drastically shift responses. The Inbar and Lammers scale could have the tacit implication that any reasonable social scientist could at most be neutral.
At least one of the authors of the target article apparently agrees with the assertion that neutrality is as far as a social psychologist would go. When I told him that I would be inclined to vote for the conservative, he seemed skeptical. I was surprised by his reaction. For all the reasons stated at the beginning of my commentary, I would welcome the intellectual opportunities and challenges owing to the presence of a conservative in my department. (Though I readily admit that the conservative's presence might cast a pall on some water-cooler conversations!)
To see whether I was alone in my preferences, I polled 16 prominent social psychologists, asking them if they would welcome having more conservatives in the field, and whether, other things equal, they would vote for a conservative job candidate or a liberal candidate. (I dropped the adjective “quite” in front of conservative, because it seemed more reasonable to compare a conservative to a liberal than to compare someone who was “quite conservative” to someone who was a mere liberal.) To my knowledge, all of my respondents would describe themselves as liberal or moderate. Thirteen of the 16 stated they would welcome conservatives to the field. There is probably a NIMBY (not in my back yard) effect, however. Only seven said that they would vote for the conservative job candidate. (Seven said they would vote for the liberal, and two said they would have no bias either way.) The existence proof here: There are prominent non-conservative social psychologists who would welcome conservatives into the field, and some of those social psychologists assert they would bend over backwards to hire a conservative into their department.
So the situation might not be as bleak as Duarte et al. assume. Their proposals for making the field more welcome to conservatives seem to me to be reasonable, possible to institute, and maybe more effective than they might assume. At the least, I think social psychologists will bear in mind the admonitions in Duarte et al.'s target article when they write or lecture, and possibly even when they frame their hypotheses and design tests for them. I hope so.
I agree with Duarte et al. that there is prejudice against conservatives and that there might be significant scientific and social gains from having more conservatives in the field.
The analogy to the entry of East Asians into the field is salient to me. East Asians have profoundly changed our understanding of the nature of the self and the relation of the self to larger groups, including society. They have also powerfully influenced our thinking about cognition. Eastern holistic thinking is at base enormously different from logical, analytic thinking. It solves some problems that analytic thinking can't.
Eastern views generate theories that would not likely come from a purely Western orientation. And the two traditions provide vantage points for critiquing each other's social practices and cognitive habits. I believe something like the same thing might be true if the social and behavioral sciences were to include larger numbers of conservatives. It would increase the range and nature of social and behavioral theories and provide valuable criticism.
As a liberal, there is another reason I want to increase the number of conservatives in the field. I want us to affect the social and political thought of conservative intellectuals and politicians. Some conservative positions are simply untenable in light of well-established social psychological theory. It's enough to mention the fundamental attribution error. There are also opportunities for affecting social policy. A frequent conservative impulse is to reject any proposed intervention because there could be unforeseen damaging effects or “negative externalities.” Social psychologists well understand these concerns, but we also have theories that can help to avoid untoward consequences, and we have methods that can test interventions before they become adopted on a large scale.
How severe is the prejudice against conservatives? As Duarte et al. acknowledge, it's hard to know because it's clear that at least a part of the reason for few of them being in the field is self-selection on the basis of interests. But there is no question that conservative students might be turned off in part by professors asserting views they believe to be supported by theory and research but which in fact are merely readouts of liberal ideology. And sometimes professors express outright contempt for conservative views, which aside from being rude, lowers our credibility with sensible people of all political persuasions.
But I doubt that we are turning away many potential graduate students with a conservative bent. For the foreseeable future, self-selection based on interests, combined with distaste for the liberal ideology of the field, will result in few conservatives applying to graduate school. And a conservative eager to apply to graduate school would undoubtedly know it would be unwise to reveal conservative beliefs in an application.
How about conservative PhDs trying to join social science faculties? Would they find it difficult to get a job? I don't doubt that a conservative political stance would be a disadvantage, but I object to the purported evidence on the point presented by Duarte et al. The Inbar and Lammers (Reference Inbar and Lammers2012) poll is flawed. The investigators asked a large number of social psychologists, “If two job candidates (with equal qualifications) were to apply for an opening in your department, and you knew that one was politically quite conservative, do you think you would be inclined to vote for the more liberal one?” The end point on the scale was labeled “not at all.” Only by checking that endpoint could respondents show they had no prejudice against conservatives. The possibility that the respondent might be inclined to be biased in favor of the conservative candidate was not taken seriously or perhaps not even considered. Moreover, we know that scale-point labels can drastically shift responses. The Inbar and Lammers scale could have the tacit implication that any reasonable social scientist could at most be neutral.
At least one of the authors of the target article apparently agrees with the assertion that neutrality is as far as a social psychologist would go. When I told him that I would be inclined to vote for the conservative, he seemed skeptical. I was surprised by his reaction. For all the reasons stated at the beginning of my commentary, I would welcome the intellectual opportunities and challenges owing to the presence of a conservative in my department. (Though I readily admit that the conservative's presence might cast a pall on some water-cooler conversations!)
To see whether I was alone in my preferences, I polled 16 prominent social psychologists, asking them if they would welcome having more conservatives in the field, and whether, other things equal, they would vote for a conservative job candidate or a liberal candidate. (I dropped the adjective “quite” in front of conservative, because it seemed more reasonable to compare a conservative to a liberal than to compare someone who was “quite conservative” to someone who was a mere liberal.) To my knowledge, all of my respondents would describe themselves as liberal or moderate. Thirteen of the 16 stated they would welcome conservatives to the field. There is probably a NIMBY (not in my back yard) effect, however. Only seven said that they would vote for the conservative job candidate. (Seven said they would vote for the liberal, and two said they would have no bias either way.) The existence proof here: There are prominent non-conservative social psychologists who would welcome conservatives into the field, and some of those social psychologists assert they would bend over backwards to hire a conservative into their department.
So the situation might not be as bleak as Duarte et al. assume. Their proposals for making the field more welcome to conservatives seem to me to be reasonable, possible to institute, and maybe more effective than they might assume. At the least, I think social psychologists will bear in mind the admonitions in Duarte et al.'s target article when they write or lecture, and possibly even when they frame their hypotheses and design tests for them. I hope so.