Article archive / October 1, 2012
Originally published: . Volume 4, No. 2. Source pages: 5.
In a September press release, The Association for Psychological Science reviewed results from a study by researchers Inbar and Lammers who surveyed nearly 800 members of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. Their findings confirm the field’s liberal bias, with only 6 percent of the respondents describing themselves as conservative “overall.”
Also it seems that conservative social psychologists hide their views because they perceive the field as hostile to their values. The more conservative respondents were, the more likely they were to report that they had experienced an intellectually unfriendly climate. Importantly, self-defined liberals did not seem to have the same perceptions of hostility. Liberal respondents were more likely to say that they would discriminate against psychologists who displayed clear conservative views in the context of a paper or grant review, a symposium invitation, and in faculty hiring.
The September issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science includes five commentaries from scholars in the field who explore and discuss these new findings. While some of the commentators question the rigorousness of the methodology used by Inbar and Lammers, they all agree that ideological bias among social psychologists has serious implications for psychology as a scientific discipline.
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